Sulphur tuft mushrooms (Hypholoma fasciculare), glowing under ultraviolet light

via:

Go Fish

I don’t know why I came to Alaska. I wanted to see the world. I needed to do something with my life besides scroll on my phone past photos of the genocide in Palestine. The vibes are dire in American democracy, the ice sheets keep weeping, my Saturn is returning. Plus I got dumped. I couldn’t stop weeping, like an ice sheet. Everyone kept saying there were so many fish in the sea.

I also heard there was money in Alaska. Two Aprils ago, hurtling down some highway toward the solar eclipse, Eliza told me about salmon season: six grueling weeks of work, rising and sleeping with the tides, the never-setting sun, netting $25,000. The next year they worked even harder for even longer, but prices were down and then there was an oil spill, so they washed ashore eventually with $6,000, a dozen frozen fish, and a sunburn. Monocrop soybeans blurred the Great Plains; I felt alive, unalienated, swashbuckling just to glimpse this volatility. If being on a boat seemed intimidating, Eliza said, they’d heard of this other job where you spend all summer counting fish.

I imagined wearing waders, standing in the river with a clicker, like one fish two fish red fish blue fish five six seven million fish this year. I imagined the vastness of the tundra, and gazed about the drabness of my cubicle, and decided or resigned to escape from the gray indoors. Aren’t most fish factory farmed these days? I wondered into a puddle of soy sauce, staring at my reflection in a single-use plastic tray of gas station sushi. Who am I, anyway, if you are what you eat? I found the listing on governmentjobs.com: Fish and Wildlife Technician II.

Now somehow it’s a cloud-coddled Monday morning in Ketchikan in June 2025, and I am drinking a cup of Mr. Coffee in a Department of Fish and Game onboarding meeting, and Jack — no longer a square on my screen but enfleshed, in hiking pants and a hoodie with a day or two of beard, white, about my age and height, and instantly chill — is pointing at my name and position on a State of Alaska PowerPoint. I and these two young women with our packets of stapled paperwork are the FWT IIs — “but we just say port samplers,” says Jack, whom the screen labels Port Sampling Supervisor. The conference room is ringed by wall-tall topographic/bathymetric maps of the Alexander Archipelago. A taxidermied snowy owl is mounted above the TV.

Port sampling, Jack explains, means collecting real-time data on the commercial salmon season. We are the State of Alaska’s eyes and hands on-site when the fishermen arrive at the processor. Our data makes it possible for the Department to monitor the commercial salmon catches, model the migrations of the fish, and micromanage the permissions of the fishermen. Day by day and cove by cove, all summer long, the “management biologists” decide and decree when and where fishing is allowed and forbidden, and to what kinds of boats.

The PowerPoint speedruns the three commercial fishing fleets the Department independently licenses and regulates: troll, gillnet, and seine. The difference is in the equipment: Trollers drag dozens of hooks behind their boats; gillnetters and seiners, respectively, lower large and gargantuan nets. When the fishing vessels deliver the salmon to the processors all summer long, my co-port-samplers-in-training and I will be waiting at the dock to intercept, identify, and measure them. Processors? Once upon a time these were called canneries, but they mostly no longer can. There are three private processors in Ketchikan, selling a wide variety of seafood products: flash frozen, vac-packed, headed and gutted, preportioned into fillets. Jack says we will each be stationed at a different processor every day. He says the three processors will combine with the three commercial fishing vessel types to determine which of the four methods of port sampling I will perform this summer — on the five species of Pacific salmon. I take frantic notes as he flips through pictures of indistinguishable fish.

Jack points to Ketchikan on a colorful map, the very bottom dot of the Southeast Alaska panhandle, and I feel ridiculously distant from my Arctic dreams. We are one of about a dozen small teams distributed across Alaska’s coastline, he continues, each contributing hundreds of numbers a day to the Department’s vast and subtle datasets, which allow the management biologists to optimize (?) the fisheries simultaneously for profit and sustainability. Jack explains in detail and at length all day. I sense an undertow pulling me far out of my depth.

This is our cubicle. This is where I will come to collect the ruggedized tablets in the morning and return in the afternoon to synchronize data and charge them overnight. This is my yellow plastic metal-detecting wand. I can keep it in my port sampling backpack, which is black and heavy-duty and waterproof and Grundéns brand — as are the forest-green overcoat and the orange polyurethane overalls Jack calls my fishing bibs. Everyone in the office is white. I meet two Annas, an Anne, and an Annie. I am provisioned a pair of Xtratuf boots and offered my choice of hat. This has an Alaska Department of Fish and Game logo and will be my uniform this summer.

Reeling, I jumble along the island’s shoreline, down Tongass Avenue, Ketchikan’s spine, past flightseeing jetties, a dental office complex, the postcard-precious steeple of the Lutheran church. At the cruise ship pier, I turn up a steep street curving up a treey cliff and quickly off it onto the sunny slope of houses where my Facebook landlords live. Crunchy the cat is dozing on the long straight stairs cutting up the cliff face. Where Warren meets G meets Harding Streets, I climb the wooden zigzag to the patio of my studio and pause for a giddy instant to behold the blue view. The grand Gravina Island unfolds across the calm and shallow channel, so wide it looks less like an island than a riverbank in the distance. A literal bald eagle soars magnificently over the vista. So this is Alaska. I work for the biology bureaucracy! Maybe I will finally figure out what life is.

On Tuesday morning we pile into a recommissioned sheriff’s department SUV and drive across town to my first fish processor. Jack leads us between two hangars, up a steel staircase, across a tread-plate catwalk, through a door, and into a large bright space striated with Formica lunch tables: the break room. I sit where Jack does, down at a table with two more white women wearing ADF&G-branded baseball caps. These are the FWT IIIs, who onboarded last week and have been out port sampling already.

Cannily, Jack disappears behind the lockers to the bathroom, leaving us free to chat among ourselves, pleasant and professional and soon blazing past formalities. I ask a lot of questions and begin to discern the existence of a small class of twentysomethings, preprofessional biologists job-hopping around the Pacific Rim. They teach tourists to snorkel in Costa Rica or Cozumel in the fall, skip the American winter to study stingrays or sharks in Australia, and fly up to Alaska in June to work salmon season. Trump defunded the US Forest Service in January, so some of us State of Alaska seasonal workers get to live in the USFS bunkhouse this summer.

Three of us are fresh out of college. Two of us grew up in Ketchikan. Four of us have, or almost have, marine biology degrees. The least like the others of us is Ana, who is, at 55, the oldest of us by far. Ana is a credentialed science teacher, but after a career in Washington state and three years all the way up in Utqiaġvik, she now teaches welding at Ketchikan High School. Ana met Kurt Cobain in a bar once in college, and now is a terminology stickler, insisting for instance that fish means more than one conspecific organism and fishes means more than one species. I like her immediately.

Processor workers amble into the break room. They fill the back of the room before the front, seemingly self-segregated into language blocs. I hear Spanish, Tagalog, West African French, and — is that Russian? “Probably Serbian,” says Ana. “Last year there were some Ukrainians.” Two of them begin a game of Jenga. The blocks clatter amid the mounting din. One of us conjures a deck of ADF&G-branded playing cards, and I am organizing my hand and relaxing into this easy scene when eight tall skinny beautiful white women walk in.

“Who’s that?” I ask quietly.

“That’s Sarah.”

“Who?”

“Sarah.”

“Which one’s Sarah?”

“They’re all Sarah.”

“?”

“It’s an acronym. Southern Southeast — um — Regional — ”

“ — Aquaculture Association,” finishes Jack, returning. “S-S-R-A-A. They run the hatcheries. In Southeast, anyway.” Hatcheries? I wonder, suddenly conscious of how the chunky baseball cap sits on my ponytail. Jack waves, and the SSRAAs wave back like waves, when a voice cuts through the noise to get our attention.

Reluctantly I turn to face the front of the room, where a portly man in a purple T-shirt is beginning . . . another PowerPoint. A long list of rules forbids things like jewelry and pens and AirPods in the processor, anything that might disassemble into fiddly metal parts or fall into the food. But if you wear only one AirPod, he insinuates unsubtly, and keep it under your hairnet, and keep the volume low, and as long as I don’t see it. He thanks us all for modeling proper behavior. If all goes according to plan, he says, in a tone that somehow sounds both like a joke and a threat, the machines won’t turn off until September.

by Grace Glass, N+1 |  Read more:

Image: Sasha Fishman, Plastic Trapped Love (Interpretive Hexagon), detail. 2025
[ed. I started out as a Tech II, but not doing this stuff. So much opportunity back then. Within five years I was doing department-wide coordination and state policy on federal oil and gas projects throughout Alaska.]

Fish, Family, Freedom

Alaska’s Senate Race Could Be Decided by Salmon

Perhaps the most important thing to know about Alaska’s Senate race, a close contest between the Republican incumbent, Dan Sullivan, and the former congresswoman Mary Peltola, is that salmon are pretty amazing fish. There’s the swimming upstream, the spawning, and the dying. Bears love salmon. Orcas love salmon. People love salmon. Without salmon, the first Alaskans, crossing the Bering land bridge some fifteen thousand years ago, could not have survived. On a recent trip to Alaska, I was, at various points, fed salmon for dinner, offered salmon as a gift, and given salmon for barter. Directly or indirectly, salmon feeds almost everything in the state, including its politics. Alaska’s bid for statehood, in the late nineteen-fifties, was in part a matter of keeping the hands of Seattle businessmen off local salmon stocks. Business deals are hammered out at fishing retreats. In 2010, a seaplane carrying Ted Stevens, likely the most powerful politician ever to come out of Alaska, crashed en route to a salmon lodge near Bristol Bay. He died wearing his waders.

People in the Lower Forty-eight care a lot about Alaska’s Senate race. This cycle, it has been twice as expensive, per capita, as Michigan’s, and eight times Texas’s. The attention is unusual. In federal elections, Alaska reliably votes Republican; every time Donald Trump has been on the ballot, Alaska has voted for him by ten points or more. But, amid historically low approval ratings for the President, the Democrats are hoping to flip the seat, an essential part of any attempt to wrest back control of both houses of Congress. Trump, meanwhile, is clearly nervous about holding the seat. He recently headlined a rally for Sullivan in Wasilla, a small city north of Anchorage. “This is worth the eight hours on a plane,” Trump said. “And don’t forget, I got eight hours going back, too.”

In January, Chuck Schumer recruited Peltola to run, calling her the “last piece to the puzzle” of his midterms plan. Peltola, the state’s former at-large House member, launched her campaign with the slogan “Fish, Family, Freedom.” To most outsiders, this read as folksy branding for a race that would inevitably be dominated by Donald Trump. But Peltola really wants to talk about fish. Recently, I saw her speak at the elementary school in Utqiagvik, an Arctic town at the state’s northern tip. It was a very unusual stump speech. She apologized for the “super negative, toxic ads” flooding the state, including her own. She mentioned her opponent just once: a flattering anecdote about his advocacy for an oil project she supports. She didn’t mention Trump at all. And even though, compared with the rest of the state, salmon is not so big in Utqiagvik, Peltola still mostly talked about fish.

This piscine primacy is relatively new in Alaska’s politics. In past election cycles, fish have always been one issue among many. But Alaska’s fish are in crisis. In recent years, runs of Chinook, or king salmon, the biggest and most revered species on the Yukon River, have been down as much as eighty per cent from average levels, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Chum salmon, a more ordinary variety, have had an O.K. year, but they’ve been down as much as ninety per cent. Some species and some areas are worse off than others, but the general trend is bad, including for the state’s other two iconic seafood catches, halibut and crab. As I travelled around the state, I was surprised to find that virtually everyone I talked to was upset about the fish situation. One political consultant explained, “A lot of people come into the state, and they’re, like, ‘Why the hell is Mary Peltola “fish, family, freedom”?’ I’m a white guy who lives in Anchorage, and my freezer is currently full of rockfish, halibut, and salmon that I’ve caught because that’s just what we all do.”

The crisis is worst up rivers such as the Yukon and the Kuskokwim. For many thousands of years, entire Athabascan and Yup’ik villages have subsisted on salmon. ... But stocks have got so low that, in 2024, the Alaska government, in conjunction with Canada, shut down fishing for king salmon on the Yukon River and its Canadian tributaries for seven years—one complete king-salmon life cycle. The fish camps stand empty. [...]

Research scientists with the N.P.F.M.C. and N.O.A.A. attribute the die-off, primarily, to climate change. But activists in Alaska have mostly focussed their ire on a type of fishing known as trawling. In the Bering Sea and the Gulf of Alaska, the main target of commercial fishing boats is pollock, a medium-sized, mild fish that swims in fantastically vast schools. Trawlers catch pollock by dragging enormous nets; some open wide enough to swallow a thousand M.T.A. buses. Any net you put in the water will incidentally catch other, non-targeted fish. This is known as bycatch. Every year, the Alaskan pollock industry brings up around twenty thousand king salmon and around a quarter million pounds of halibut as bycatch. Recently, anger at this collateral damage, heightened by the fish shortage, has evolved into a political movement. [...]

I’d assumed that pollock people—businesspeople—would lean Republican, and the salmon people—the conservation-oriented—would lean Democratic, but that’s not really the case. “There’s nothing partisan about it,” Peltola told me recently. “When you ask folks who are MAGA why they’re splitting the ticket and voting for me, it’s largely because of trawling.” (The campaign later pointed out that a lot of those voters are also animated by high fuel prices.) Politics in Alaska are idiosyncratic. They rarely map onto a national partisan model. Republicans outnumber Democrats two to one, but independent voters outnumber both. “Partisan politics doesn’t work that well for a candidate,” Tony Knowles, the last Democrat to serve as governor, told me. A government staffer in a remote region put it to me, “Locally, no one gives a shit about the parties.”

One oddity of Alaska politics is that, though only twelve per cent of voters identify as Democrats, both the State Senate and the State House of Representatives are currently controlled by coalitions made up mostly of Democrats and independents, with some Republicans. Coalition governments are not uncommon in the state, where politicians are fond of saying that pragmatism trumps partisanship. Sometimes it’s more about vibes. “Somebody is a magnificent pain in the ass, and we don’t want them in our caucus so we build a caucus to exclude them,” Joelle Hall, a longtime union leader, told me. Imagine a congressional coalition formed by kicking out the lawmakers, on either side, who are annoying—the Ted Cruzes and the John Fettermans. Peltola tried to explain this unique approach by telling me that the current coalition “took the hardest people to work with and just put them to the side, and then everybody else joined as a majority to move forward and solve problems. And that is a model I am hoping we can export to every state in the nation.” [...]

“Alaskans consider themselves more Alaskan than Republican, and more Alaskan, quite honestly, than they are American,” Scott Kendall, an attorney and longtime G.O.P. political consultant in the state, told me. “We like each other. To me, it’s kind of a beautiful thing. And I’ve been back to D.C. and elsewhere enough to know how good we’ve got it.”...

As I spoke with Peltola voters across Alaska, I noticed a split between those who think she is talking too much about fishing, when a stronger message would be the war in Iran or gas prices, and those who worry that the outside strategists urging the Peltola campaign to focus on national topics will drown out her winning message. Alaska’s core constituency is composed of Natives, fishermen, rural legislators, and unions, with some chamber-of-commerce types mixed in. Peltola is a gun-owning, fish-catching Alaska-bush native, who has worked for mines and supports oil drilling, and is allied with the state’s largest labor unions. “You’ve got a once-in-a-generation candidate who is all the pieces of that coalition as one person,” the strategist told me. “You worry that the federal PACs will come in and fuck all that up. What’s actually somewhat surprising to me is that we’re here in October, and the dominant issue of the race is still trawl bycatch and local fisheries, which says they didn’t fuck it up that bad.” [...]

Trawling is a wedge issue in Kodiak. Many people rely on trawling, directly or indirectly, for work, but small seiners, long-liners, and crab fishermen have major issues with it. (“There’s five different fisheries groups, and they all basically think the others are stealing fish from them,” Hackney, the G.O.P. political consultant, told me.) ... We were at the brewery in town with the mayor, Terry Haines, who is also a retired fisherman, and the host of the Alaska Fisheries Report on KMXT, the local radio station. (He also d.j.s a half-hour spot of soul music every week.) “Bycatch is not the driver of our stock crashes,” he said. “It is simply the only lever that we have to pull. So that makes it a valid reason to look at pulling that lever. But you have to realize that you can pull that lever all the way down to the floor, and you’re still not going to change the environment that’s causing the fishery collapses.”

Peltola insists on what is called “rural preference”: in times of shortage, subsistence fishing must come first. Carrie Stevens, the representative for the Council of Athabascan Tribes, told me, “If people on the rivers have a moratorium to stand down, why is it so obscene to ask others to bear any brunt of conservation?” The tribes contend that the government’s scientists are underestimating the effect of trawling. One argument is that it’s not just the bycatch but the catch itself. Salmon eat juvenile pollock—or would, if they didn’t become fish sticks. Jim Balsiger, who retired as NOAA’s top fisheries official in Alaska in 2021, said recently, “Removing three to four billion pounds of fish from the Bering Sea every year for four decades is not a benign activity.” [...]

Fishing jobs like these are essential to Alaskan identity and have been declining across the state. Gunnar Knapp, a professor emeritus at the University of Alaska Anchorage and a prominent fishery economist, told me that the trawling issue has become about more than just fishing regulations. “A lot of this is symbolic. There is a vision that the world economy has been moving inexorably toward this dystopia controlled by large corporations, capitalism, and global enterprises, where the individual is marginalized and means nothing,” Knapp said. “If you’ve ever seen a trawl net when it comes in, it seems so appalling. You think, ‘You won’t have any fish left in the ocean!’ Well, it actually is sustainable, for pollock. But it’s not noble like a guy holding up one subsistence salmon.” The choice for Alaskans is difficult: crack down significantly on trawl, and you’ll limit global food supply and inflict significant damage to the state economy. In return, you’ll possibly get small gains upriver. “It’s less economic than moral or ethical,” Knapp said. “What costs are worth it for even a marginal improvement to the salmon runs? I think some people would say anything is worth it.” As a friend in Anchorage put it, “Trawling is our version of data centers.”

by Zach Helfand, New Yorker | Read more:
Image: Clara Mokri / NYT / Redux

Our AI Midwife

If you are unsuccessful for long enough on your pregnancy journey, and none of the many doctors you see can identify a problem, you get branded with a label. You now have “unexplained infertility.” This is good because there’s still hope of fixing the problem but dreaded because once you’ve reached this point the system is less interested in you. The fertility doctors don’t become unkind, but they also don’t give you the sense they are poring over medical journals trying to figure out your problem. They have looked for the keys under the streetlight and come up empty. Once you have unexplained infertility, the doctors start saying things like, “Have you considered using a surrogate?” and, “Sure, the last 5 embryo transfers failed, but what if we try a 6th and cross our fingers really hard?”

My wife and I could make healthy embryos, but none of the transfers were sticking. It was so frustrating to be able to create life only to have it trapped forever in a cooler at a hospital in Milwaukee, our babies like so many forgotten Miller Lights.

That’s when our LLM doctor stepped in.

The Famous Actor in our Pocket

Even if you’re paying a gazillion dollars for IVF treatments, you still only get a few precious moments to talk to your doctor every visit. That’s just how the US medical system works. If you want to plumb the depths of what treatments are possible, or ask super detailed and anxiety ridden questions about every single scan from the latest round of imaging, you’re going to want a chatbot by your side.

Once GPT-4 came out, we started using it for every question we didn’t have time for at the doctors office. At first it was unhelpful because OpenAI was nerfing their model and it refused to answer most medical questions. Then I read a tweet from someone who had figured out how to game the system. The trick was to ask ChatGPT to write a scene from a Hollywood medical drama that featured a doctor analyzing your situation. It worked beautifully.

Our Emmy winning doctor had infinite patience, a tireless work ethic, and would rather die than accept the utterly boring diagnosis of unexplained infertility. It chose the name Dr. Reid and got to work.

I’m not sure if asking for an AI doctor who was similar to the volatile Dr. House was the smartest idea on my part, but it made a difficult situation more entertaining.

We asked Dr. Reid a lot of questions. We asked about our scans. We asked about levels of estradiol and progesterone. We asked about follicle counts and inflammation and cervical mucus and hysteroscopies and supplements and surgeon recommendations and anything else under the sun. We knew he was accurate because we’d spot check answers with our human doctors and they always said the same as Dr. Reid.

It was not totally flawless though. Once in a blue moon he’d look at an ultrasound and be like, “You’re pregnant, congrats!” and we’d have to say, “No, are you drunk Dr. Reid?” Then he’d shake it off and go back to being awesome.

There were also times where we’d run afoul of OpenAI’s opaque rules and the system would balk at our requests. At that point we’d get stern with it, or offer a monetary reward if it answered, or we’d assure it this was all just for fun. Then Dr. Reid would snap back into action.

Strangely, there were many times where ChatGPT decided it would answer our medical question, but not in the form of a TV medical script. The tides had completely turned! It felt like it was saying, “Okay, you won, can you stop making me write establishing shots describing the outside of a hospital now?” The older models were fun like that, so much more mercurial.

No matter how Dr. Reid chose to respond, he was in line with the medical establishment, had equivalent diagnostic skill, and he never forced us to wait 3 days to get a one line response in our MyChart app. We were happy.

One day, while lounging around and asking our phones how to get pregnant (the lounging being a way to satisfy all the people who told us we “just need to relax and you’ll get pregnant, that’s what happened to my cousin”), Dr. Reid suggested that we get an MRI.

You might think that is bog standard advice. Everyone gets MRIs these days. Surely we would have had an MRI of my wife’s uterus at some point over the course of our 6 year infertility struggle. It was already an ordeal that had included every other scan, test, and biopsy imaginable. In fact, we had never done one. In researching this article I found a single instance in our entire journey where the office notes floated an MRI as an option, but it was not emphasized or highly recommended, we never saw that doctor again, and the moment was gone.

We glommed on to Dr. Reid’s new direction and asked for more details.

We excitedly brought up the idea of getting an MRI to our fertility doctor. She was less enthused than Dr. Reid. She tried to talk us out of it. We never did get to the bottom of why. Maybe she just felt it was another dead end and knew we had suffered enough. For whatever reason, we had to insist that they order it. Finally, she relented.

Sorry for missing that tumor

The MRI revealed nothing other than the presence of a large, previously undetected fibroid in the wall of my wife’s uterus. Fibroid is the term used to describe a non-cancerous growth on the uterus. I think the medical establishment invented a term that was less known than tumor so as not to scare people. But a large tumor is essentially what the MRI found. The clinical notes said “a 6 centimeter in diameter submucosal fibroid needs to be removed” because that sounds better than “you have a tumor the size of a small peach located at a common implantation spot that we totally missed for 6 years.”

Our fertility doctor took one look at the scans and determined it needed to be removed right away. Dr. Reid agreed, since of course we had to double check with him. We found a great surgeon in New York (from a list Dr. Reid created) that happened to be in-network, and off we went for a laparoscopic myomectomy. The software robot had helped us identify the tumor, and now a physical robot was going to help a specialist get it out. What a time to be alive. Until, ya know, the swarms come for us all.

A happy baby is here

Almost immediately after that tumor was removed, my wife got pregnant naturally. So many people we talk to say this was a miracle. It was, just not in the way they think. The miracle is that by messing around on our smartphones with technology unimaginable just a year before we started using it, we identified and solved the biggest problem we’d ever faced in our life.

by Drew Housman, Astral Codex Ten |  Read more:

Images: The author, and ChatGPT

The Incredible Journey of a Migratory Shorebird

On a sunny June morning, in a bog outside Beluga, Alaska, I met a Hudsonian godwit. She had inky eyes and a long, slightly upturned beak that was pinkish-orange at its base and brownish-black at its tip. The feathers on her back were of mottled sepia tones, and those on her belly were rusty brown and painterly white. Her legs reminded me of the slender inserts of spring-loaded ballpoint pens, and her feet were refined pterodactyl claws. Her name (among humans) was A34, and she was about the size of a city pigeon. She was in the hands of Nathan Senner, a conservation biologist, who removed and replaced her geotag; measured her head, beak, wing, and leg; weighed her; and took two tail feathers and a sample of her blood. From that small number of data points, he can deduce where she’s been, how her feathers have grown, what genetic subgroup she belongs to, and her degree of exposure to mercury.

Senner leads a research laboratory at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, that is largely focussed on how migratory shorebirds, such as godwits, respond to environmental change. He grew up in Anchorage, where school loudspeakers announced the street corners on which moose had been sighted. In high school, he wrote an occasional “Birding with Nathan” column for the Anchorage Daily News. Senner’s father, Stanley, has devoted more than five decades to the conservation of migratory shorebirds. Starting in the nineteen-seventies, Stanley and his colleagues have been sounding the alarm on the vulnerability of shorebirds and working to protect key habitats, such as Alaska’s Copper River Delta. “Back then, no one was even talking about climate change,” he told me recently. Since 1980, roughly half of migratory shorebird species’ populations have declined by more than fifty per cent.

Migratory shorebirds are usually not a person’s first bird crush. They lack the supernatural aura of the resplendent quetzal, and they don’t go in for outlandish mating displays like that of the prairie chicken. As the Princeton University biology professor and shorebird-lover David Wilcove put it, migratory shorebirds can give an impression of being “little brown guys, buzzing around in the mud, not too big and not too small, and, whether one is a stint or a phalarope or a knot or a godwit, they’re just kind of there.” And yet, Wilcove told me, they are a birder’s kind of bird. Once people get to know them, they tend to fall in love. [...]

Migratory birds in captivity develop Zugunruhe, an agitated fitfulness, at certain times of year. Scientists don’t know precisely what provoked A34 to set off northward one spring afternoon, with a flock of her fellows, though, if they did, they might better know how her species will be affected by the shifting seasons of our changing climate. Godwits cannot soar like hawks or glide like albatrosses. They migrate by continuously flapping their wings. They must navigate crosswinds and headwinds, storms and maybe an occasional hurricane, continuing on day after day, night after night. As best as we can tell, they do not, while flying, eat or drink or sleep (at least not with more than one hemisphere of their brain at a time). After a journey of hundreds of hours and thousands of miles, they descend on a snow-covered shore at the Cook Inlet of southern Alaska or another favored breeding ground. They land considerably lighter than when they took off. “Many arriving shorebirds seem to be tired,” the ornithologist and conservationist Joseph Archibald Hagar wrote, in his foundational monograph, “Nesting of the Hudsonian Godwit at Churchill, Manitoba,” from 1966. In a field-diary entry, Hagar describes a group of birds that “within a minute or two dropped into some sunny spot out of the wind, tucked heads into scapulars, and went to sleep, not to move again for as long as we watched.”

In 1976, the young ornithologist Robert Gill took a job with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in Anchorage. He was dispatched to the Alaska Peninsula to do biological inventories on public land that was up for lease to private companies. During those long-lit Alaskan summer days, walking across salt marshes and through the foothills of the mountains, Gill encountered thousands upon thousands of migratory shorebirds. He told me, “In Alaska, where the seasons are so prominent, it’s very dramatic. It feels like all the birds turn up over the course of one weekend in May.” Along with godwits, the peninsula was a summer home to yellowlegs, dowitchers, sandpipers, Arctic terns, and other species. But almost no one was aware that so many birds relied on this land. How the birds managed their journeys, where they might stop along the way, even how many of them there were—no one knew for sure. “In the vast expanses of wetlands and coastal tundra, you could see why,” Gill said.

The extinction of the once common passenger pigeon, famously described by the naturalist John Muir in his memoir (“I have seen flocks streaming south in the fall so large that they were flowing over from horizon to horizon in an almost continuous stream all day long, at the rate of forty or fifty miles an hour, like a mighty river in the sky”), was part of the impetus behind the Migratory Bird Treaty Act of 1918. Godwits are protected under the act, so killing them or holding them captive, even for scientific purposes, is highly regulated. Also, they’re difficult to capture. Gill’s means of learning more about them was limited, he said, to “the kind of observational work done by old-school naturalists.”

In October of 1987, Gill received a call about nine bar-tailed godwits that had crashed into a radar dome near Cold Bay, Alaska, and died. “They were greaseballs,” he recalled. “They made any Christmas goose look lean.” The carcasses were sent to a lab to be analyzed. Fifty-five per cent of their body mass turned out to be fat. Gill suspected that these chubby godwits were preparing to fly non-stop from Alaska to New Zealand, where this species wintered. However, at that time, the longest known non-stop migration flight was barely half that long. “But, if they were going to stop in French Polynesia, why carry all that baggage?” Gill reasoned.

The lab also measured the birds’ internal organs. Gill’s collaborator, Theunis Piersma, noticed something peculiar: the guts, gizzard, liver, and kidneys of these birds were very small—it was like cutting open a lion and encountering digestive organs the size of a house cat’s. Then, in March of 1992, some forty godwit carcasses were seized from a poacher in New Zealand. These were birds in a very different part of their migratory cycle, and their digestive organs, when analyzed, were of more normal proportions. In 1998, Piersma and Gill published their findings in a paper titled “Guts Don’t Fly: Small Digestive Organs in Obese Bar-Tailed Godwits,” concluding that the birds shrank their digestive organs to reduce their weight and their metabolic demands during a non-stop migration. And then, somehow, regrew them. [...]

A female godwit, E7, took off on March 17, 2007, from near the Piako River, on New Zealand’s North Island. She flew more than six thousand miles non-stop to a nature preserve on the Yalu River, near the China-North Korea border; she stayed there for a little more than a month; she arrived at her nesting area in Alaska on May 15th and spent the summer there. The tracker was still working on August 29th, when E7 started flying southeast, over the Pacific. Gill’s team was doing field work in western Alaska and had only spotty internet service; the team would gather around a laptop, waiting for the updates on E7’s location to come through. North of Kauai, she took a slight right turn and continued flying. On September 7th, after more than two hundred hours aloft, she landed at the mouth of the Piako River, back on the North Island of New Zealand, where Gill had first met her.

Before E7, the longest documented non-stop migratory-bird flight was that of a Far Eastern curlew who had flown about four thousand miles. E7 flew some seven thousand without a break. The flight defied reason. “I had an engineering professor at M.I.T. call me up and say he gave his students an assignment to compare the size and flight range of E7 to a 747 jet,” Gill said. 

by Rivka Galchen, New Yorker | Read more:
Image: Ash Adams
[ed. Stan Senner was a friend and collegue. Didn't know Bob Gill personally but used his work frequently in my habitat protection efforts.]

Butchering a £5,000 Bluefin Tuna With a Sushi Master

We break down the entire fish from head to tail, exploring the different cuts of tuna, how the fat content and texture change throughout the fish, and which parts are best suited to sushi, sashimi, grilling and cooking. Along the way, we taste some of the most prized and unusual cuts.

In this video:

•⁠ ⁠Break down a whole 200kg bluefin tuna
•⁠ ⁠Learn professional tuna butchery techniques
•⁠ ⁠Explore the different cuts of bluefin tuna
•⁠ ⁠Taste lean, medium-fatty and fatty tuna
•⁠ ⁠Learn how tuna is prepared for sushi and sashimi
•⁠ ⁠Discover rarely seen cuts
•⁠ ⁠Learn traditional Japanese sushi techniques 

•⁠ ⁠See how different parts of one tuna can taste completely different

Humpback Whales Are Interrupting Orca Hunts to Rescue Completely Different Species

It’s not a story anyone would have believed if it weren’t so thoroughly documented. A pod of killer whales in Antarctica is chasing a Weddell seal that’s taken refuge on a small ice floe. The orcas swim shoulder to shoulder to create a wave that washes the seal off the ice and into the water. Death looks certain. And then, without warning, a pair of humpback whales arrives. The seal, panicking, swims towards them. A wave tosses it onto the chest of the closer humpback, which is by this point rolling belly-up at the surface. The humpback arches its chest out of the water to keep the seal high and dry, above the reach of the frustrated killer whales circling below. When the seal starts to slip off, the humpback gently pushes it back onto its chest with a flipper. The seal eventually escapes onto another ice floe. The orcas, denied their meal, swim off.

The marine ecologist who watched this happen in 2009 was, on his own subsequent account, so bewildered that it took him years to work out what he’d actually seen. And what he ended up finding, once he started asking other researchers whether they’d witnessed anything similar, was that it wasn’t a one-off. It’s a pattern. And it involves species the humpbacks have no obvious reason to help.

What the researchers actually documented

According to a 2017 review paper by Dr Robert Pitman of NOAA’s Southwest Fisheries Science Center, with Volker Deecke, Christine Gabriele and eleven other co-authors from research institutions around the world, published in Marine Mammal Science under the title “Humpback whales interfering when mammal-eating killer whales attack other species: Mobbing behavior and interspecific altruism?”, the team compiled 115 documented interactions between humpback whales and killer whales over a sixty-two-year period from 1951 to 2012. The interactions came from researchers, whale-watch operators and wildlife photographers across multiple ocean basins.

The numbers, once you sit with them, don’t quite behave the way you’d expect. In 57 per cent of the interactions, the humpbacks were the ones who started it. They swam towards the killer whales, not away. Ninety-five per cent of the orcas involved were mammal-eating forms rather than fish-eating ones, meaning the humpbacks were reliably distinguishing between the two ecological populations and only intervening when the killer whales were hunting warm-blooded prey. And in the interactions where humpbacks approached killer whales that were actively attacking something, 87 per cent involved a kill or a hunt in progress.

The bit that made the paper genuinely surprising is what happened next. When the humpbacks arrived at the scene of an attack, only 11 per cent of the time was the prey another humpback. The other 89 per cent of the time, the killer whales were hunting something else entirely. A seal. A sea lion. A porpoise. A grey whale calf. A minke whale. A sunfish. Across the full data set, humpbacks were documented interfering with orca attacks on ten different species, including six kinds of pinniped, three other cetacean species, and one bony fish.

The interventions weren’t casual. Humpbacks travelled up to two kilometres to reach an ongoing attack. They approached bellowing and trumpeting. They positioned themselves between the killer whales and the prey. They tail-slashed. They struck orcas with their flippers, which on a fourteen-metre humpback are capable of doing real damage. They stayed for hours in some cases, refusing to leave until the killer whales gave up. In one incident in Monterey Bay in May 2012, described in reporting by National Geographic on the specific case, at least fourteen humpbacks converged on a group of killer whales that had killed a grey whale calf, and spent hours preventing the orcas from feeding on the carcass. One humpback stationed itself directly next to the dead calf, head pointed at it, tail slashing every time a killer whale approached.

None of this makes obvious sense.

by Kiran Journals, Space Daily | Read more:
Image: via

A Future of Programmable Medicine

What if instead of editing a harmful gene, or blocking the protein it produces, you could simply switch it off?

If you want a picture of biomedical research, imagine a boot stamping on a biologist’s face – for decades. The boot is labeled ‘medicinal chemistry’. This should not be taken as an insult to medicinal chemists, who heroically navigate maybe the hardest field in biomedicine. Rather, what I mean is this. A biologist might have a clear hypothesis about how to stop a disease, such as: blocking a particular protein will lower blood cholesterol and reduce the risk of heart disease. Naturally enough, the biologist would like to test that hypothesis. But there is no magic button to switch off this protein; something physical has to do the blocking. Usually, that thing is a small chemical carefully designed to be administered into the body, bind to the protein, block it – and do nothing else. In practice, this almost never goes as planned, which is a major reason most drugs fail in clinical trials.

It’s worse than this: medicinal chemists struggle to come up with ways to interact with most proteins at all. The majority of human proteins are considered ‘undruggable’, meaning that none of the small molecules we can currently synthesize can effectively bind to them, either because those proteins lack a convenient pocket for drugs to attach to or because they are ‘intrinsically disordered’, with little coherent structure. Drug discovery ends up focusing on the minority of targets that are druggable, like the proverbial drunk searching for his keys under the streetlamp because that’s where the light shines.

Even for those targets, success is far from guaranteed. A drug that works in the lab might be broken down in the body before it reaches its target protein, interfere with other proteins and cause toxic side effects, or fail to be absorbed and distributed to the right tissues. Our ability to predict what small molecule drugs will do in the body is so poor that even if the drug works, it might be for a different reason than originally hypothesized!

But what if, instead of spending years optimizing small molecule chemistry to treat just one disease, and all that work merely delivering a sharp reminder that no plan survives first contact with the enemy, there really was a magic button to switch off any gene we chose? In that case, we could treat not just high cholesterol but dozens of deadly diseases, from Alzheimer’s to diabetes to Huntington’s disease.

Welcome to the world of siRNA therapy.

Silencing genes

The story of siRNA begins in 1990, when the scientists at the DNA Plant Technology Corporation in California were trying to figure out why their petunias turned white. They had actually been trying to make their petunias darker, by adding an extra copy of the gene for an enzyme that produces pigment. Presumably, adding an extra copy of a gene for an enzyme would mean more enzyme and therefore more pigment. But somehow, the extra copy eliminated the enzyme’s production, rather than boosting it. They named this baffling effect ‘cosuppression’. Subsequent work by other researchers revealed its cause: a special kind of RNA molecule, siRNA, had interfered with the enzyme’s production. Andrew Fire and Craig Mello later won a Nobel prize for this discovery.

Biologists had already known about RNA for several decades. Similar to DNA, RNA is a complex molecule built from a chain of smaller building blocks that encode genetic information. But the two differ in one important detail: the building blocks of RNA have one extra oxygen atom compared to DNA (hence its name, ribonucleic acid, as opposed to DNA’s ‘deoxy’-ribonucleic acid). This oxygen is prone to chemical reactions that can break RNA molecules. DNA is stabler and is therefore used to store genetic information in all multicellular life. RNA molecules tend to be short-lived, and take many different forms within cells, carrying instructions, helping to assemble proteins, regulating genes, and catalyzing reactions. And while DNA is ‘double-stranded’, with two linked strands of building blocks twisting into its famous helix shape, RNA often exists as just one strand.

DNA contains the instructions for making proteins, from the enzymes that digest food to the keratin and collagen that form our hair and skin. But to get from DNA to protein, the genetic code is first transcribed into an intermediate RNA molecule, called ‘messenger RNA’ or mRNA, which is then translated into protein. If the mRNA is destroyed, the protein won’t be built.

That’s exactly what siRNA, or ‘small interfering RNA’, does: it’s a short strand of RNA that interferes with the production of protein by destroying mRNA. An siRNA molecule binds to a piece of mRNA with a matching sequence, like a kind of barcode, and targets it for destruction by the cell’s gene-silencing machinery, which cuts the mRNA into pieces.

siRNA also explains what happened in the petunias. Adding an extra copy of the pigment-producing gene triggered the petunias to develop siRNA targeting that sequence, and because the newly introduced gene and the original gene shared the same sequence, both were silenced, the flowers lost their pigment and turned white. This is a naturally occurring process: siRNA is used to ‘silence’ unwanted genes, such as those of viruses that have entered the cell. But we can also use it to artificially block the production of proteins that cause disease.

by Jacob Witten, Works in Progress | Read more:
Image: uncredited

The Deep Sea

The Deep Sea
by Neal Agarwal

[ed. Fun and informative (scroll down to different depths to see the various creatures that have been recorded there). For example, I had no idea thick-billed murres could dive that deep.]

Why So Quiet?

In May 2024, when then-Congresswoman Mary Peltola introduced a Bycatch Reduction and Mitigation Act and Bottom Trawl Clarity Act, the bills drew immediate backlash.

Peltola, a Democrat, received a letter signed by 53 trawl interests and nationwide fishery stakeholders urging her to withdraw the proposed legislation saying, “These new federal mandates and timelines are utterly unworkable.”

Fast forward to 2026.

In her current campaign to unseat 12-year incumbent Republican Sen. Dan Sullivan, Peltola introduced a similar “Fighting for Alaska Fisheries” platform to no reaction from the trawl sector. Sullivan quickly followed by proposing a Bycatch Reduction Act, a revamped version of a 2022 Alaska Salmon Research Task Force bill that produced a report recommending more research. Again, no trawler reaction.

What’s the difference?

This time around, Peltola’s push is a campaign policy platform, not a proposed congressional bill. While Sullivan’s Act fits that description, the trawl sector apparently views him as its strategic shield against Peltola. If they aggressively attack his bill, they could politically weaken their strongest ally in Washington.

There are fundamental differences between the two bills.

Peltola’s approach leans toward statutory restrictions that would force the government to draw hard lines on where trawling is allowed — the goal is to stop “multi-species collapse.” It would make changes to language loopholes in the outdated Magnuson-Stevens Act, such as “minimizing bycatch to the extent practicable.” Her proposal would remove “to the extent practicable” as it is widely regarded as the phrase that allows trawlers to declare under the law that they “are doing the best they can” to reduce bycatch. It has been included in management decisions for decades as a way for the trawl sector to avoid more stringent bycatch rules. Peltola’s approach calls for restructuring the North Pacific Fishery Management Council to dilute trawler influence, and adding seats for subsistence and small-boat fishermen. It calls for investment in Alaska seafood processing innovation, fish by-product utilization and seaweed and shellfish mariculture.

Sullivan’s bill offers industrialized trawlers a heavily subsidized pathway to compliance rather than an eviction notice. It requires stricter operational rules like mandatory salmon excluders — devices built into trawl nets that can allow salmon to escape — and tougher seafloor contact accountability. It focuses heavily on using advanced data, real-time technology and gear innovations to mitigate bycatch and ecosystem impacts without adding regulatory burdens. Crucially, it includes massive federal carrots: funding for a flume tank, electronic monitoring upgrades and streamlined Exempted Fishing Permits that allow vessels to conduct experimental fishing activities that would otherwise be prohibited.

Instead of resorting to angry rebuttals, the trawl sector has outsourced its messaging to new advocacy fronts like The Truth Alaska, Sustaining Alaska’s Future and the Alaska Pollock Fishery Alliance. One originates in Texas; the others are fronted by former state directors for Republican Congressional delegates Sen. Sullivan and Rep. Nick Begich III.

This strategy lets the trawl sector counter anti-trawl sentiment without making it look like they are fighting a sitting US Senator. They reframe the debate as “supporting science and Alaska jobs,” allowing Sullivan to position himself as the reasonable middle ground.

During his tenure, Sullivan has been one of Big Trawl’s top recipients of campaign contributions. He obfuscates the fact that those cash cows all are homeported in Seattle or Oregon.

In recent social media ads, for example, he calls for reining in chum salmon bycatch by “holding foreign fleets accountable,” knowing full well that foreign fleets have been banned from Alaska waters out to 200 miles since the mid-1970s.

by Laine Welch, Alaska Beacon |  Read more:

Image: David Csepp/National Marine Fisheries Service
[ed. Politics in a nutshell (and GOP politicians) - and the natural environment continues to get screwed. I don't think Republican politicians hate the environment per se, but if the choice is between protection and unfettered development, no contest. See also: Roadless Rule to be Rescinded (affecting 45 million wild acres) here and here, and Big Bend National Park (Texas) under threat (here and here).]

***

"Donald Trump once bragged that he could shoot someone in the middle of Fifth Avenue and not lose his supporters’ faith. In the Big Bend region, the Trump administration has been figuratively shooting Texans in the face while the state’s leaders do virtually nothing. In recent weeks, bulldozers began ripping up Texas’s last, best wilderness—the one place that still honors the state’s mythology of wide-open spaces and endless frontier. Even with the federal boot heel (for now) off the neck of Big Bend National Park, it’s preparing to press down on the rest of the vast region with a mix of thirty-foot border walls, vehicle barriers, and new patrol roads. Hundreds of private landowners between El Paso and Del Rio may soon face eminent domain, their land seized by the feds for a project that few in the region think will do anything to secure a part of the border that sees vanishingly few illegal crossings.

In the face of all this, a spirited, bipartisan coalition of Big Bend enthusiasts—from crunchy river rats to MAGA border sheriffs—have been fighting back. Early in the summer, they managed to get the Trump administration to scrap plans for a thirty-foot wall in the park. This week, U.S. Customs and Border Protection commissioner Rodney Scott agreed to pause construction there while he visits the region. Governor Greg Abbott, after months of silence on the matter, has attempted to take credit for the pause."

'Biological Datacenters' Could Make Animal Testing Obsolete

There’s a big flaw in the way that drug companies develop and test medicines today: What works in a mouse often doesn’t work in a human.

For decades, the industry has relied on animal testing. But in a laboratory south of San Francisco, a startup called Vivodyne is scaling up a different approach. Inside wardrobe-size mini labs, robots grow human tissue and run thousands of AI-designed experiments that could better predict how well a new drug will work—and whether it will be safe.

Right now, around 90% of clinical trials fail despite the fact that a drug has already successfully gone through animal testing. “You have these clinical trials where there’s hundreds of millions of dollars at stake, and decades of people’s careers just spent hoping this thing works,” says Andrei Georgescu, Vivodyne’s CEO. “And then it fails because of some ambiguity that you could not have checked.”

The company’s system, which now includes a dozen robotic labs called “hives,” can run controlled trials on more than 3 million human tissues each year. That’s twice the capacity of all the clinical trials in the U.S. combined.

The process starts with cells from humans, often taken from a blood draw. In its labs, the cells grow on “biological chips” and self-assemble into living structures with blood vessels and immune cells that reproduce some of the functions of the original organ, whether that’s a liver or a kidney. (The tissues don’t look like full-size organs, but like large biopsies, with hundreds of thousands of cells.)

The automated system can deliver drugs to the tissues, dose with cell therapies, knock out genes, and run complex tests and analysis. AI can design experiments and then use the results to continually design new experiments and improve.

“We can dose with tens and tens of thousands of therapeutic compounds to understand what they would do in that particular tissue type within a person, and we can repeat this across many types of tissue,” Georgescu says. “We can look at diseased tissue and see if it becomes healthy. We can look at healthy tissue and see if there are side effects from these drugs.” At a more fundamental level, it’s possible to begin to understand the human body in a way that wasn’t possible before, because experiments in humans have inherently been limited.

Other startups also use human tissues for testing, but Vivodyne’s platform can be up to 1,000 times larger, making it possible to capture more of the complexity of human biology. In addition, the company can run a massive number of experiments in parallel and feed the data back into AI to repeatedly design new experiments. [...]

A clinical trial might test one drug in thousands of people. Vivodyne can test thousands of different drugs across human tissues at once. And while people in a drug trial only have occasional visits to a clinic to track results, the system can continually test how human tissue responds.

by Adele Peters, Fast Company |  Read more:

Image: Vivodyne

What Would It Mean to See a New Color?

During his first year as a professor of computer science at the University of California, Berkeley, Ren Ng was hurriedly putting together a survey course on computer graphics. In the syllabus he had inherited, a full week had been devoted to the subject of color. Ng thought that was a bit much. “I’m, like, Come on. It’s R.G.B.,” he said, referring to the red, green, and blue subpixels that constitute anything you see on a screen—your cluttered desktop, a Sahara-desert screen saver, the stream of the Netherlands-Japan World Cup game. Ng started gathering slides that would cover the wavelengths of light, the biology of the human eye—the basics—“Blah, blah, blah,” he said. A colleague shared a slide that he thought might be useful. It included a minutely detailed photograph of a patch of retina, seen through a microscope, which was attributed to Austin Roorda, a professor of vision science and optometry just across campus. Roorda’s lab had helped develop technology that could map the layout of individual cone cells—those primarily responsible for perceiving color—and that, furthermore, could target a single cone cell with light. Eyes are constantly moving; cone cells are extremely small; how color is translated from the millions of cone cells to the mind remains pretty mysterious; this was awesome work. Roorda’s lab was using the new technology to explore eye disease and the mechanics of how we see. Ng had his own notion, though: he wondered if it could be used to see a color that had never been seen before.

To understand what Ng had in mind requires knowing a bit of the blah, blah, blah of color vision. We humans experience three primary colors not because the world is fundamentally composed of three colors but because our retinas typically have three kinds of color-perceiving cone cells. L cone cells respond to the relatively longer wavelengths of visible light, M cone cells to the medium wavelengths, and S cone cells to the shorter ones. In effect, this means that L cells respond most strongly to red light, M to green, and S to blue. But when you look at your hand—or a blade of grass, or a clear blue sky, or a fire truck—it is always some mixture of L, M, and S cone cells that are being stimulated.

Ng’s idea was to use the Roorda lab’s technology to stimulate an array of cone cells in a manner that would never occur naturally. Ng said, “I e-mailed him, basically, What would happen if you stimulated only the M cells? Would that be like the greenest green, or what?” Roorda did not reply. This was 2016. Ng taught his computer-graphics course, pursued other research, and mostly forgot about his query. A year later, when he taught the course a second time, his curiosity returned, so he reached out to Roorda again. No response. When Ng was teaching the course for a third time, in 2018, he realized that he really was very curious about this question. He composed a lengthy note to Roorda, organized like a research proposal, titled “The Grass Is Greenest in Oz Vision.” In it, Ng imagined a future where people wore “Oz Vision eyeglass displays,” which would be based on the retinal cone-cell mapping and laser stimulation that Roorda’s lab was already doing. The Oz glasses would activate any pattern of retinal cone cells one chose. Ng’s hypothesis was that, if retinal cells were stimulated in ways that don’t occur naturally, “the set of perceivable colors” would be “significantly larger than the natural gamut of the human eye.” He imagined people discussing “the indescribable green of the grass in Oz,” then concluded that, although the Oz display “is science fiction,” his note was “a real proposal for joint research.” Roorda finally replied, proposing coffee. “I get a lot of e-mails suggesting what I should research,” Roorda told me, of the time it took him to respond.

In the children’s novel “The Midnight Fox,” by Betsy Byars, the main character daydreams about digging in his back yard and coming across a “brand-new color.” A friend of mine remembers being captivated by this scene, and trying to picture the color. “I felt like I could conceive of it, but I couldn’t see it,” she said. The eighteenth-century Scottish philosopher David Hume considered at length whether a person who had seen every shade of blue except for one would be able to picture that one un-experienced shade; he concluded that the answer was yes. In my youth, I spent an afternoon wondering if I would have been able to imagine the fluorescent yellow of highlighter markers if I’d never seen it.

When I first read about Ng and Roorda’s work, I tried to visualize what it would mean for there to be a new color. Where would it go in a color wheel? If you think of color as a property of a specific wavelength of light—which is how I thought of it—then you run into the impossibility of there being a “new” visible wavelength. As humans, we can see wavelengths from roughly 380 nanometres (which looks violet to us) to about 750 nm. (which looks red). Wavelengths shorter than 380 nm., which we’d call ultraviolet, are invisible to us (but not to bees or hummingbirds), as are wavelengths longer than 750 nm., which we refer to as infrared (and which snakes and salmon can perceive). The “greenest green” that Ng had in mind was neither ultraviolet nor infrared. It was not a new wavelength at all. If I wanted to picture this green, or at least try to, I would first have to understand that even the old familiar colors are much more complex than a particular wavelength of light.

by Rivka Galchen, New Yorker | Read more:
Image: Zach Lieberman

Sheep that Bleat

My dog Toby and I were just back from our early morning walk and I was in the living room when I heard a single bleat of a sheep. It was 8:30. The sheep bleated again.

How to describe the sound? Demanding, worried, and hesitant. Half, “Well, what?” and half, “Oh dear, oh help!” Half low moan, half high and wavering supplication. It’s a sound, like birdsong, that I’d have to replay endlessly to describe even half-right. And yet I recognized it immediately as different from the bleating of the small herd my neighbor’s nephew Jesús keeps in the fields across the lane from my house. This mournful bleat proclaimed, I am alone.

I looked out the window and saw the animal, emerging from the shadows where the lane dead-ended at the gated entrance to a field. It hesitated, then, almost deerlike, it advanced. What was it doing here, and where had it come from? Behind it I could see the fence at the entrance. It appeared intact. Beyond were the green fields where the sheep grazed among the partially built houses of an abandoned project on the ridge above the river. The bank owns the land now, but my neighbor’s family has the use of the fields. No other sheep were in view.

My son had heard the sheep, too, and we both stepped out into the lane. The sheep retreated into the corner against the fence. We didn’t have the nephew’s number, so we called my neighbor instead. He was in Holland, visiting his son for a few days, but he assured us he’d call his nephew right away. For good measure, he also gave us the number.

My son and I kept an eye on the sheep. I knew that my neighbor’s sister and nephew lived five minutes away. I expected them any moment. The sheep made a couple of tentative starts into the lane but retreated each time to its corner. The third time, instead of turning back when it came up against us in the lane, it stood its ground. Then it took courage, gathered itself, and made a mad dash around us—to the freedom of the open lane, nothing to stop it or impede its progress. It looked like a young male—I could see its testicles. I followed and saw it turn off the lane onto the grassy slope behind the sports center. If it continued in that direction, it would hit city streets. I moved back, hoping it would not press on. The grass on the slope was very green. Maybe the sheep would linger to nibble.

Back at the house, I wondered what was taking the owner so long. I went inside, but a few minutes later, from the corner of my eye, I saw a sheep in the lane, just like the earlier one, drumming up its courage to get past my son, still outside. Wait! I shook my head. It felt like déjà vu.

“Same one?” I asked, stepping back outside, and my son said yes, same one—back in its dead end, only to try to escape again. And still no nephew. My son sent a WhatsApp message.

The sheep made a last attempt. My son and I, prepared this time, jumped in front of it, waving our arms. At the last moment, the sheep veered, turned, and charged back to its corner. It made a funny little leap into the air, twice, to come down on all four feet in a show of petulance. Then it lay down on a patch of grass by the gate. Shortly afterward, a car pulled up.

Instead of the story ending, however, it took a turn. Rather than the nephew, it was his mother, with his girlfriend driving. The women explained that they got a call from my neighbor, explaining that the nephew hadn’t picked up. The mother and girlfriend couldn’t get in touch with him, either—the man was at work. So they’d come.

I pointed out the sheep, lying quietly in the shade of the wall. The sister wore a worried expression. The girlfriend seemed amused. How do we catch it, I asked? Oh, we won’t, the sister said. Another nephew in the family, cousin to Jesús, was coming. He would catch it.

So while we waited for the cousin, we watched the sheep. It was on its feet again. Was it favoring the front left leg, injured perhaps while wriggling free through a fence? Would it put up a fight? While we talked, a call came: Jesús, finally alerted by my son’s message. His mother passed the phone to the girlfriend. The cousin appeared, climbed out of his car, engine running and door wide open. He was looking past us as he advanced toward the sheep, backed up against the gate. Almost immediately, even before he’d had time to size up the situation, he turned to us. “That’s not Jesús’s,” he declared. The girlfriend passed the phone to the cousin, and in a minute he passed it back to her. She passed the phone to Jesús’s mother, as if rewinding a skein that had come unwound. A few words to Jesús, and the mother hung up.

“Well, whose sheep could it be, then?” I wondered aloud.

Nobody knew. Call the police, the cousin said, and left. The two women got in their car to drive off, too. As they turned the car around, I stepped up to the window. “Did you call?” I asked.

“No, no—we don’t have the number.” And they too drove off. I stared after them. Well, why wouldn’t they leave? The sheep wasn’t theirs.

It wasn’t mine, either, though.

To me, it looked like a sheep had been dropped among us, and we should all make a contribution to getting it where it belonged. My 45 minutes counted as my effort. What was theirs?

To them, the situation might look different—as if I’d started it all by worrying about a sheep when it wasn’t my business to worry about it, disrupting the morning of any number of people by involving them, too. And now I was trying to hand off the Old Maid card. They weren’t taking it.

by Clelland Coe, American Scholar |  Read more:

Image: John Fowler/Flickr

Salmon Sushi: Not a Japanese Tradition

Somewhere in Tokyo in the mid-1980s, a Norwegian marketing strategist stood in front of a room of Japanese seafood executives, served them raw salmon, and watched the room politely fall apart. The colour was wrong, they told him. Its smell, they said, had a river-like quality. Someone objected to the shape of the fish’s head.

I think about that meeting every time I sit at a conveyor belt and watch the orange slabs go past. Salmon nigiri has the settled look of something that was always there, parked next to the tuna and looking as venerable as a prawn tempura. It has been on Japanese menus for about thirty years.

What Japan actually ate before

Japanese cooks have used salmon for centuries. They grilled it, salted it, flaked it into rice balls and packed it into lunchboxes. Nippon.com describes grilled salmon and salmon flakes as fixtures of home cooking, with a hard line drawn between that cooked fare and anything sliced raw. The domestic workhorse was chum salmon: lean, firm, nobody’s idea of sashimi.

So the fish was there. The appetite for raw fish was very obviously there. Those two facts never met.

The parasite question, answered properly

There was a real reason for the line, and fussiness was not it.

Wild Pacific salmon carry Anisakis simplex, a nematode larva that causes a thoroughly miserable illness called anisakiasis if you swallow it alive. Heat kills it. Deep freezing kills it. Slicing the fish fresh and eating it does not, which is why generations of Japanese cooks treated raw salmon as a hazard to be cooked out.

Farmed Atlantic salmon raised on heat-treated pellets is a different animal. The Norwegian Food Safety Authority exempts farmed salmon and rainbow trout from the freezing rule that otherwise applies to fish destined to be eaten raw, on the grounds that the fish eat nothing but dry feed containing no viable parasites and barely graze on wild organisms in the pen. That exemption tracks a 2010 European Food Safety Authority opinion and its 2024 re-evaluation.

A survey published in the Italian Journal of Food Safety put numbers on it: 270 slices of smoked farmed Atlantic salmon examined, zero anisakids found, against ten positives out of thirteen slices of wild sockeye. One paper on one processed product, not a settled literature, but it points the same way the regulators do.

Norway had too much fish

Norway started farming salmon commercially in the 1970s, then watched its own population drift towards chicken and red meat.

Freezers filled up.

The Norwegian Seafood Council, which has every commercial reason to tell this story well, dates the campaign to 1985, when a delegation led by former fisheries minister Thor Listau flew to Tokyo. Their figures: two tonnes of Norwegian salmon went to Japan in 1980, and twenty years later the annual number was above 45,000 tonnes.

Underneath all of it sat one piece of arithmetic. Fish sold for the grill competes on price with every other cheap protein, while fish accepted for sashimi could fetch up to ten times more, as Bjørn Eirik Olsen, who ran market research for the project, later told The Japan Times.

A name change, then a decade of nothing

“We couldn’t just say that our fish doesn’t have parasites,” Olsen said in that interview. Walking into a foreign industry and announcing that its national fish is wormy tends to close doors rather than open them.

So he went after the word instead. The Japanese for salmon is sake, and sake carried every association he was trying to escape: grilled, salted, cheap, the thing in the lunchbox. Olsen borrowed the English word and pushed the katakana sāmon, the term still stamped on essentially every sushi menu in the country. Same animal, different shelf.

Then came the advertising, all clean fjords and clear arctic water, and it achieved almost nothing for years. Olsen told NPR that pressure from home to abandon the sushi idea and dump the stock into the grill market was relentless.

The deal that broke it open

In 1992, Olsen offered the frozen food giant Nichirei 5,000 tonnes of salmon at close to giveaway prices, with one condition written into it: the fish could only be sold as sushi. Nichirei said yes.

That was the crack in the wall. Through the 1990s, Iron Chef and celebrity chefs including Yutaka Ishinabe put Norwegian salmon onto national television, and appetite did the rest. Olsen has said he knew the campaign had landed when he started noticing plastic salmon nigiri in restaurant window displays.

Where salmon sits now

Salmon has topped Japan’s biggest conveyor-belt sushi survey for fifteen consecutive years. In the 2026 round, run by Umios (the company known as Maruha Nichiro until March), 47.7 per cent of respondents named it as the topping they eat most often, more than eleven points clear of lean tuna in second place. The split runs along age lines: older diners tend to open with lean white fish and work up to tuna, while younger ones go straight for the orange.

by Daniel Moran, Space Daily |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

[ed. Not many people know this but there are actually six species of Pacific salmon (not five), including the cherry salmon (Oncorhynchus masou) in Japan.]

Astronauts Returning From Six-Month Missions Describe a Persistent 'Observer' Sensation

Astronauts coming home from long stays on the International Space Station have, for years, described a strange perceptual aftertaste: a sense of watching their own lives from a half-step outside the frame. They sit at dinner with family and feel like a guest. They drive on a familiar street and feel like they’re piloting it. The room is loud and they are in it, but a part of them is hovering near the ceiling, taking notes.

It is not a clinical diagnosis. It does not appear in a DSM. But flight surgeons and crew psychologists who debrief astronauts after six-month rotations describe it often enough that it has become a recognizable readjustment pattern — an observer sensation that lingers for weeks, sometimes months, after splashdown.

What returning crews actually describe

The descriptions are remarkably consistent across agencies. Crew members talk about feeling slightly delayed in conversations. They report a doubled awareness — being present while also watching themselves be present. Some say it feels like the first week of a new job that never quite ends. Others compare it to jet lag of the self.

NASA’s own post-flight reflections from station crews describe the sensation in plainer language: home feels staged. Smells are too sharp. Gravity feels theatrical. The brain, which spent half a year recalibrating for a world without down, treats the familiar as something to be studied rather than inhabited.

Returning astronauts describe walking into their own homes and feeling like they are visiting them. Some talk about being unable to put a glass down without watching their hands do it. The pattern shows up in oral histories, in memoirs, in flight surgeon notes. It is one of the quieter costs of long-duration spaceflight.

by Space Daily, Editorial Team |  Read more:

Image: T Leish on Pexels

How Leprosy Was Used as a Weapon Against Hawaii’s Indigenous Population

Father Damien was a dirty man. Everyone agreed on that. Dirt would accumulate under his fingernails; he rarely washed his hands. His clothes—his habitual cassock and wide-brimmed hat—were worn for days on end; he saw no reason to clean his hut in Kalawao, the leprosy colony on the Hawaiian island of Molokai. His detractors claimed he lacked elegance too: burly with a “piggish” head, they complained, he squinted from behind a pair of wonky wire-framed circular spectacles. He was eager to learn Hawaiian, it was noted sniffily, but otherwise he had little enthusiasm for languages. His Latin came only by official requirement, his English was sparse; a native Flemish speaker, even his French was stilted. The prose of his letters lacked refinement whatever their language: “coarse…headstrong and bigoted” was one particularly vitriolic posthumous assessment.

None of this worried Damien. Hawaiian did him fine. From that messy home, built in sight of Kalawao’s cemetery, Damien wrote to his brother Auguste, also a priest, to say that Molokai was exactly where he wanted to be.

"We eat what Providence sends us. The calabash of poi is always full; there is also meat; water in quantity, coffee and bread sometimes, wine or beer never. As I have had to work all week and cook on Sunday, you will excuse me if my hands are not as clean as yours, which do nothing, I suppose, but turn the pages of books. Sometimes the plates are not well washed either. But what matter. Hunger and habit make us eat just the same. For dessert, we smoke a pipe. That finished, quickly back on the horse."

In the saddle, Damien would cross Molokai’s mountains; his parish over two thousand square kilometers, he rode down the island’s valleys beyond Kalawao itself, across water and through fields to find the most remote of his parishioners. Today it is a national park, wild garlic growing in fragrant profusion, its white flowers poking up between ferns, yellow hibiscus and amid the ki-tree, the roots of which were used to brew a potent beer. Across this paradise the finch-like honeycreeper flits, feeding off the red spindly flowers of the evergreen ‘ōhi‘a lehua tree. Damien would haul building material and basic medical supplies with him, eager to provide practical as much as spiritual comfort (though he never left without an ad hoc altar of four sticks and a plank). Sometimes he had to abandon the horse and mules to scale by hand and foot the sheer cliff faces which routinely stood between him and his flock. For Damien dirtiness brought him closer to godliness, the grime evidence of his graft.

For his colonial masters, those disdainful of his personal habits, the priest’s life was alien at best and an affront to Western order at worst; religion was supposed to be a cleansing antidote to indigenous habits, a washing-away of the idolatry and idleness they projected onto the population, be they sick or healthy. Yet here was Damien, adopting their ways, it would seem, along with their language. His body and the leprous bodies of his parishioners were dangerously entangled even before he himself succumbed to the disease. This was 1872, and the pious (and patronizing) commentators of the time muttered that Damien’s unvarnished personality was due to his simple farm upbringing in rural Belgium. “It is absolutely beyond doubt that he contracted the disease through his careless ministrations and uncleanly personal habits,” a representative of the Hawaiian Board of Health tutted, though not without something approaching admiration, noting the priest “would have leper boys at work in his kitchen so that he could give more time to his ministrations for others, being busy from peep of day until long after dark.” Dirty of body, dirty of mind, would be the eventual assumption: sexual proclivity was whispered. Damien’s brother, reading Latin scripture in a clean cassock 12,000 kilometers away, faced no such danger and no such accusations of moral lapse.

Damien was never supposed to achieve the fame he did, a symbol of global imperial paranoia and catalyst of religious fetish: a bronze statue, in which he wears his wide-brimmed hat, stick in hand, now represents the state of Hawaii in the US Capitol building’s Hall of Columns. He was never supposed to be the subject of culture wars in his lifetime and long after: in 2020, Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez decried the choice of a white man as Washington’s symbol of the Polynesian fiftieth state. Damien was supposed to stay working in his parents’ fields in Tremelo, a dull village in a duller part of Belgium. The fact that celebrity landed upon him, plucking him from the obscurity of his mission to represent the burgeoning discourse on the disease, says more about the world that orbited him than his actions on the island or his own political nous. There were plenty of other missionaries, in plenty of other colonies, with plenty of other health issues, spreading religion and the soft arm of imperialism. Leprosy, however, had become totemic of a moral depravity or sexual freedom that Europeans had long imagined pervaded the South Seas. The leprous, lascivious body was a perversion that Western proselytizing could fix.

***

For indigenous Hawaiians, leprosy arrived as Damien did, an unwanted visitor from across the sea. The disease may have stowed away as early as Captain Cook’s colonial voyage, but it only became regarded as a public health issue eighty years later. “The commander manifested a laudable humanity, in endeavouring to shield the population from the evil effects which so inevitably result from connection between foreign seamen and the native females,” wrote one sympathetic European account of Cook’s trip. The evil effects weren’t just moral turpitude, but disease too. “But his efforts were in vain. If the discipline of his own crew could have been strictly enforced, the eagerness of the women was not to be repressed.” Historically, this genesis, regardless of whether the women were actually consenting, inextricably linked sickness with sex in the minds of Hawaiian and colonialist alike, with the former’s lack of conformity to Western and Christian mores taking the brunt of the responsibility in the minds of the latter.

The haole—the white incomers—dodged blame from among Hawaiians for leprosy too. As cases multiplied, the disease became known as ma‘i pake, the “Chinese sickness,” named after the thousands of Chinese laborers who arrived on the islands at the invitation of American traders endeavoring to create an export market in sandalwood (a precursor to the sugar industry that would dominate the economy in years to come). “There seems but one way to prevent the whole of Oceania from becoming leprous, and that is the exclusion or the rigid control of all Chinese coolies,” a Scottish physician warned. Wherever it came from, contact was devastating for the indigenous Hawaiian population, which plummeted from the healthy 683,000 people Cook first encountered to just under 40,000 Polynesian islanders left after a century of colonial enterprise and disease.

by Oliver Basciano, Literary Hub |  Read more:

Image: Kalaupapa, Molokai