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MAKING SENSE OF NONSENSE WORDS

p.26

SCIENCE

JUNE 2021

THAT MATTERS

HOW TO SPOT PSEUDOSCIENCE ONLINE AND IN YOUR LIFE p.30

FUN WAYS TO FIGHT FAKE NEWS p.52

PLUS:

WHEN SCIENCE SAVES ART p.58 JOURNEY TO THE MOON’S FARSIDE p.62

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Tales From the Fringe From Bigfoot to the anti-vaccine movement, fringe theories are everywhere, lingering in the shadow of science. Where do they come from? JENNIFER WALTER

COVER STORY

Show Me the Science

Beneath any valuable study, you’ll find a web of research, institutions, humans — and, of course, money. Trust in science hinges on the process.

Humans deceive — and so do animals. Here’s why we fall for trickery, and what happens when lies go unchecked.

He’s spent years researching misinformation. Now this psychologist makes online games to vaccinate the public against fake news.

AJA RADEN

ALEX ORLANDO

Natural-Born Liars

Truth Serum

ANNA FUNK J U N E 2 02 1 . D I S C OV ER

CONTENTS

HOT SCIENCE P. 9

Take a look at the search for antimatter, the debate over protecting endangered species, the theories about how biological life travels through space, what to read or watch next, and much more.

p. 66

COLUMNS & DEPARTMENTS

Damage Control

Fading Sunﬂowers and Screams

Mistruths are all around us. So how do we combat them?

p. 18

INBOX Our readers ponder which way Orion faces and the history of the Everglades.

Centuries ago, the discovery of two elements led to new — but unstable — yellow pigments. Today, scientists are deploying particle accelerators to save artwork in these shades. STEPHANIE DEMARCO

Spin Doctor

In Search of the Dark Ages

VITAL SIGNS

Not all cases of vertigo are created equal. TONY DAJER

PIECE OF MIND

What’s in a Name? Some words sound like what they mean. And they could influence everything from fictional depictions of aliens to your first impression on a job application.

p. 62

HISTORY LESSONS

DAVID ADAM

OUT THERE

A telescope planned for the farside of the moon could plug a 500-million-year hole in cosmic history. ERIC BETZ

#SCIENCEIRL Hidden in a COVID-19 stimulus bill was a new national park. ANAMARIA SILIC

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EDITORIAL TIMOTHY MEINCH Features Editor ELISA R. NECKAR Production Editor ALEX ORLANDO Associate Editor JENNIFER WALTER Assistant Editor MOLLY GLICK Assistant Editor HAILEY MCLAUGHLIN Editorial Assistant ANAMARIA SILIC Journalism Resident

ome people in my life have never forgiven me for becoming a journalist. For more than a decade now, I’ve been persona non grata on certain email threads where family members frequently share “news” and “facts” that they have gleaned from the internet. When occasion demanded it — and I’m sorry to say that the occasion often demanded it — I would have to be That Guy. The one who quashed the urban legend. The one who inconveniently provided links to hard evidence. I was the debunker, the skeptic. Or, as some members of my family would have it, the party pooper, the spoilsport. “Don’t make fun of my facts!” a relative once chided me. “It’s not a joke!” I’m not laughing. I’ve never actually made fun of friends and family who fell prey to fake news or pseudoscience. I don’t find it one bit funny when the people I care about are led astray by mistruth. It has happened to all of us at one time or another. And when it has happened to me, I get angry — at myself for letting my critical thinking skills lapse even briefly, and especially at the people out there who knowingly purvey false information. This issue is a chance to channel that anger into something productive. As Assistant Editor Jennifer Walter notes in “Tales From the Fringe,” on page 30: “When unfounded and false information is presented as scientific to skew the truth or blatantly lie, it can cause real damage in the world.” It’s everyone’s job — yours too — to repair that damage or prevent it from occurring in the first place. Even if it makes you the family spoilsport. That’s a badge I’ll wear proudly.

Stephen C. George Editorial Director Feel free to send comments and questions to editorial@discovermagazine.com

Contributing Editors MAKING SENSE OF NONSENSE WORDS p.26

SCIENCE

THAT MATTERS

HOW TO SPOT PSEUDOSCIENCE ONLINE AND IN YOUR LIFE p.30

FUN WAYS TO FIGHT FAKE NEWS p.52

BRIDGET ALEX, TIM FOLGER, JONATHON KEATS, LINDA MARSA, KENNETH MILLER, STEVE NADIS, JULIE REHMEYER, DARLENE CAVALIER (special projects)

DISCOVERMAGAZINE.COM MEGAN SCHMIDT Digital Editor DONNA SARKAR Digital Content Coordinator

PLUS:

WHEN SCIENCE SAVES ART p.58 JOURNEY TO THE MOON’S FARSIDE p.62

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INBOX

WHICH SIDE ARE YOU ON? (“The Supernova That Wasn’t,” Jan/Feb 2021)

• SPECIAL ISSUE! •

SCIENCE

THAT MATTERS

JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2021

THE STATE OF

SCIENCE

2021 Apparently scientists (or, at least, COVID-19 science journalists) can’t seem to agree on which way zodiacal figures face. Science News and Discover both discuss the recent variation in Betelgeuse’s brightness. Science News notes Betelgeuse’s observed position as “marking the hunter’s left shoulder” while Discover states that it “forms Orion’s right shoulder.” Seems one of them regards the figure of Orion’s as facing towards Earth while the other regards him as facing away. Ron Seiden Franklin, Pa. CRISIS HANDBOOK WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW p.22

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FIXING FOOD ALLERGIES p.47

MURDER HORNET MAYHEM p.62

TRUTH ABOUT 5G NETWORKS p.68 OLDEST HUMAN DNA p.53

BONUS IMAGES OF THE YEAR p.70

Alison Klesman, senior associate editor of our sister magazine, Astronomy, responds: You’re right — whether Betelgeuse is Orion’s left or right shoulder depends on whether the Hunter is facing toward or away from us. And the International Astronomical Union, the ruling body that determined the current 88 standard constellations we use today, doesn’t give much guidance — their published constellations only show the outline of each figure, rather than a drawing depicting features. I personally have nearly always seen Orion depicted as facing toward Earth, though. Furthermore, whether he is holding a bow or a shield (again, that depends on the depiction), it seems to make sense that he’s facing toward Earth so he can shoot his bow toward or hold his shield to protect himself from Taurus the Bull — both of which a right-handed man would do with his left hand. So, I’d say that Betelgeuse is Orion’s right shoulder, which means it appears on his left side as we are facing him, front to front. But perhaps we could all do to be a bit more specific when describing the star in the future, and say Betelgeuse is on the left side of the constellation as viewed from Earth.

ISLANDS IN THE STREAM (“Forest Islands Amid a Grassland Sea,” Jan/Feb 2021)

Bridget Alex gives us an interesting report on possible ancient cultures in South America and the origin of forest islands. As I read her analysis, I wondered if the same comments

D IS C O V E R M A G A Z I N E .C O M

might relate to the hammocks in the Everglades? Driving along Route 41 between Naples and Miami, one can see many small plots of trees among the vast “river of grass.” If humans migrated from north to south in the Americas, then populating the Everglades would have happened before populating the Amazon Basin. Have

these forest islands ever been explored for this possibility? John Derr Port Charlotte, Fla. Author Bridget Alex responds: That’s an interesting proposal, and one which seems reasonable to me. But it’s hard for me to evaluate because I don’t know about the ecological or geological history of the region. I do know the earliest archaeological site is in the Panhandle region — PageLadson, dated to about 14,500 years ago. The oldest sites in South America are about the same age, or older. It seems the first people in the Americas split, with some populating South America and other groups inhabiting North America. The Amazon forest islands likely formed a few thousand years later; if the Florida ones are human-made as well, there’s no reason they must have been made by the same people as the Amazon ones. I shared your question with José Capriles, one of the archaeologists who worked on that study. He wrote: It seems like similar processes might have been involved in the formation of the Everglades tree islands and more research could identify additional similarities and contrasts in these environments. I do know that Archaic Period mounds are also common elsewhere in Florida, so we know that people were congregating in some of these sites and I am sure they were also engaging with some level of plant and landscape domestication.

In the editor’s letter in our Jan/Feb 2021 issue, Editorial Director Stephen George asked what the biggest science story of the year was — besides COVID-19. Here’s how some readers responded:

• I can say that you have rightly selected COVID and CRISPR. However, you may consider publishing something about Roger Penrose’s mathematical discovery in 1965, which was recognized by the Nobel committee in 2020. — Kanan Purkayastha

• One of the biggest science stories for me this past year was the Great Conjunction that occurred on the evening of winter solstice, Dec. 21. Unfortunately, it clouded over prior to sunset here in my location. However, friend shared a picture — a beautiful image of the sunset low in the horizon and the brightness of the Christmas Star. — T.S. Workman

• I think the biggest science story of the year will be electrification of transportation, though it may take time to realize that. When people see how quiet, clean, and healthy their cities become with electric vehicles, they will be the new paradigm. Electric planes and boats will follow, and we will be enjoying a convenient, economical, more sustainable world. Twenty-five years from now, history will see that as the biggest contribution of science in 2020. (Well, maybe 2021 — but it’s coming!) — Paul Heusinkveld

HOT SCIENCE TH E L AT E ST N E WS A N D NOT E S LIFE FROM SPACE? • THE VALUE OF A SPECIES • THE SEARCH FOR ANTIMATTER BATTERY SCIENCE • OZONE HOLE STATUS • FISH FANCLUB • DOG YAWNS • REVIEWS

SUPER SUNFLOWERS Deep within these resilient desert beauties, supergenes help generate growth in the harshest environments. They might sound like something out of the Marvel universe, but supergenes are large clusters of DNA that have been found in some plants, butterflies, birds and ants. In prairie sunflowers, they influence seed size, bloom timing and other environmental adaptations. Writing in Nature last July, one team identified 37 supergene blocks in wild sunflowers, such as those that help prairie sunflowers weather blazing temperatures and last weeks without water. If that’s not impressive enough, prairie sunflowers can thrive in most states in the continental U.S., making them masters of adaptation. — JENNIFER WALTER; IMAGE BY NOLAN C. KANE/ UNIVERSITY OF COLORADO BOULDER

J U N E 2 02 1 . D I S C OV ER

HOT SCIENCE

D I S C O V E R M A G A Z I N E .C O M

Did Life Come From Space? SOME ASTRONOMERS HYPOTHESIZE THAT ASTEROIDS AND COMETS MIGHT SHUTTLE BIOLOGICAL MATTER BETWEEN PLANETS.

LEFT: JOHAN SWANEPOEL/SHUTTERSTOCK. RIGHT: EUROPEAN SOUTHERN OBSERVATORY/M. KORNMESSER

Life, for all its complexities, has a simple commonality: It spreads. Plants, animals and bacteria have colonized almost every nook and cranny of our world. But why stop there? Some scientists speculate that biological matter may have proliferated across the cosmos itself, transported from planet to planet on wayward lumps of rock and ice. This idea is known as panspermia, and it carries a profound implication: Life on Earth may not have originated on our planet. In theory, panspermia is fairly simple. Astronomers know that impacts from comets or asteroids on planets will sometimes eject debris with enough force to catapult rocks into space. Some of those space rocks will, in turn, crash into other worlds. A few rare meteorites on Earth are known to have come from Mars, likely in this fashion. “You can imagine small astronauts sitting inside this rock, surviving the journey,” says Avi Loeb, an astrophysicist at Harvard University and director of the school’s Institute for Theory and Computation. “Microbes could potentially move from one planet to another, from Mars to Earth, from Earth to Venus.” (You may recognize Loeb’s name from his recent book Extraterrestrial: The

First Sign of Intelligent Life Beyond Earth, which garnered headlines and criticism from astronomers for its claim that our solar system was recently visited by extraterrestrials.) Loeb has authored a number of papers probing the mechanics of panspermia, looking at, among other things, how the size and speed of space objects might affect their likelihood of transferring life. While Loeb still thinks it’s more likely that life originated on Earth, he says his work has failed to rule out the possibility that it came from somewhere else in space. Meanwhile, recent experiments have suggested that earthly organisms can survive in space, at least for a little while. Experiments aboard the EXPOSE-E facility at the International Space Station have subjected bacteria, lichens and plant seeds to the extreme cold and radiation of space for anywhere from a few days to over a year. Some

Recent experiments have suggested that earthly organisms can survive in space, at least for a little while.

The mysterious object ‘Oumuamua passed through our solar system in 2017. Loeb has suggested it could have been sent by extraterrestrials.

bacteria and other organisms were able to survive the journey, including tardigrades, ultra-hardy animals found everywhere from Arctic ice to the deep ocean. If an asteroid or comet is large enough, microbes could be frozen deep within, Loeb says. That could protect them from radiation and the extreme temperatures that turn meteors into fireballs. After they explode onto the surface of a new world, these extraterrestrial colonists could begin to thrive. In other solar systems, panspermia could be even more likely to occur than in our own. For example, the seven tightly packed planets of the TRAPPIST-1 system, discovered in 2016, might be ideal for life to planet-hop. If we find life there one day, Loeb says, we should pay attention to whether it all looks suspiciously similar. He thinks two neighboring planets with similar biological systems would be a sure sign that life had traveled between them at some point.

Loeb also hypothesizes that panspermia could occur even between distant star systems. Interstellar visitors, like the recently observed space object ‘Oumuamua and the comet Borisov, could spread life from system to system. Such a process could even begin on our own planet. In a paper published in the journal Life, Loeb looked at the possibility that asteroids or comets might graze the Earth’s atmosphere, dozens of miles above the surface, picking up microorganisms floating high in the sky, before heading out on interstellar journeys. He estimates that, though rare, a few such instances have likely occurred during Earth’s lifetime. Even if an asteroid flyby did pick up a few microbes from Earth, it’s highly unlikely that they would survive the journey, much less land on another planet with conditions similar to ours. But, then again, we can’t necessarily rule it out. — NATHANIEL SCHARPING

J U N E 2 02 1 . D IS C OV ER

HOT SCIENCE

Do We Really Need to Protect Every Species? FOCUS ON INDIVIDUALS OR ENTIRE ECOSYSTEMS? SCIENTISTS DISAGREE. Extinctions of species occurred long before humans arrived on

The Bramble Cay melomys lived solely on a small island at the northern tip of the Great Barrier Reef. It was wiped out in 2016 by sea-level rise.

THE CLAIM:

THE COUNTERPOINT:

PROTECT ECOSYSTEMS, NOT SPECIES

MORALS MATTER

or Peter Kareiva, the president and CEO of the Aquarium of the Pacific, the term biodiversity crisis wrongly inflates the role of individual nonhuman species in human well-being and prosperity, when in reality, holistic ecosystems are more important. A marshland that stifles tidal waves may not need 16 different species of shellfish to hold it together. It’s a “dramatic extrapolation,” he says, to conclude that the extinction of one species would imperil the coastline and thus human well-being. Kareiva adheres to a metaphor developed by biologist Paul Ehrlich: Nature is like an airplane, and species are the rivets that hold it together. Without a few rivets, a plane can still fly,

but if you take too many out, the plane will fall apart and crash. The trouble is, Kareiva says, we don’t know how many rivets we can take out. Instead of trying to nail down that number, we would be better served focusing on an ecosystem’s functions — that is, keeping the plane in the sky, rather than saving every rivet. “The first question you ask is, if this species goes functionally extinct, what will be different about the world?” A scientist’s role, he says, should be to answer that question as the evidence society uses to decide whether a species needs to be saved. Some conservation biologists, however, have turned into activists, when instead it is up to society to weigh social and cultural values against what it would take to protect a species. Often that means deciding whether to spend hard-tofind money in conservation or elsewhere.

ierra Curry is both a scientist and activist with the Center for Biological Diversity, and she’s well acquainted with the nonprofit cash crunch. Sometimes she feels pushed to concentrate efforts on protecting a more famous species, like the monarch butterfly, rather than the seemingly mundane freshwater mussels in the art that line her walls. A focus on preserving ecosystem services can often bolster financial support, but for her, allowing a species to go extinct is wrong. The funding exists for conservation, but we choose not to use it. “Extinction is a political choice,” she says. “ ‘We only have $100 million, what can we save?’ That’s not the question. The question is, ‘How do we get a billion dollars?’ ” Valuing the natural world in terms of how each individual species benefits humans may be too narrow a view, Curry says. “We’re not always looking at the right metrics.” For

instance, genetic diversity can make ecosystems resilient in the face of drastic changes like climate change and disease, she notes. A single invasive species may replace native species and accomplish an ecosystem function in the short term, but a disease would more easily wipe it out in the future. Diversity also brings honest allure, Curry says. “It’s the box of 128 crayons versus the box of eight crayons. No kid wants the box of eight crayons on the first day of school, when they could have the box of 128 crayons.” Curry’s main motivation, however, is morality. Mass global extinctions have happened five times before, but humans have the capacity to understand that we are causing this one. “Because we know,” she says, “I think we have the moral responsibility to take care of our fellow earthlings.” — IAN MORSE

FROM TOP: IAN BELL/EHP/STATE OF QUEENSLAND/WIKIMEDIA COMMONS; CENTER FOR BIOLOGICAL DIVERSITY; ANDREW REITSMA/AQUARIUM OF THE PACIFIC

Earth. By that definition, it’s a natural process. But today, extinctions are increasing rapidly — and very often linked to human activities. Take the Bramble Cay melomys, a small rodent on a remote island uninhabited by humans. In 2016, it became the first mammal to be erased from the planet due to climate change. Some conservationists mourned, but others questioned whether every extinction is something to worry about. In the face of tough decisions about human lifestyles and the climate crisis, a split among scientists is surfacing. Losing one species may not change life as we know it, so perhaps our limited conservation resources should focus on preserving the biodiversity in those systems where it benefits humans. Sometimes, such as when dense forests prevent landslides, a great diversity of species isn’t needed to perform this function. Essentially, we must ask the question: How should we value life?

The Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer has been collecting data from the International Space Station since 2011, but has yet to turn up evidence for antimatter. The K in T2K refers to Kamioka, Japan, where the Super-Kamiokande Detector resides deep underground. The detector uses this giant, water-filled cylinder to detect neutrinos shot from 180 miles away in Tokai — the T in the project’s name. Recent data show how neutrinos and antineutrinos change from one type to another — at different rates — as they travel.

The Search Goes On NEW PARTICLE ACCELERATOR DATA FROM THE T2K EXPERIMENT COULD FINALLY TELL US WHERE ALL THE ANTIMATTER WENT.

FROM LEFT: KAMIOKA OBSERVATORY/ICRR; JSC/NASA

In 1996, Discover reported on a new experiment that would probe the far universe for signs of antimatter. These particles are theoretically identical in behavior to the ones we know, but with opposing electrical charges, among other differences. Physicists’ theories about the Big Bang say there should have been equal amounts of matter and antimatter created during the event. But we live in a universe full of matter, with little antimatter in sight. There are different explanations for this, including that all of the antimatter might just be too far away to see. The search for distant antistars and antigalaxies was the focus of our April 1996 article, “The Antimatter Mission,” which chronicled the genesis of an experiment called the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer (AMS). The experiment set out to

measure cosmic rays to see if any of them came from antimatter. The AMS has been running on the International Space Station since 2011, but it has yet to turn up much evidence for antigalaxies and the like. It could be that our universe is largely empty of antimatter, which poses another question: Where did it all go? Scientists have long posited that slight differences in how matter and antimatter behave could have led matter to win out in the moments after the Big Bang. But finding those asymmetries has proved difficult. Now, physicists with Japan’s T2K experiment have published data that move us closer to an answer. T2K scientists are tracking a curious property of neutrinos, hard-to-detect particles that rarely interact with matter. Neutrinos change type, or flavor, as they travel — for example, muon neutrinos might turn into electron neutrinos.

The T2K experiment has been watching how both regular neutrinos and antineutrinos oscillate between flavors, and they’ve noticed there’s a slight disparity in how they behave. The transition of a muon neutrino to an electron neutrino happens at a higher rate than that of a muon antineutrino to an electron antineutrino, says Mark Hartz, a particle physicist at Canada’s York University and co-author of a recent Nature paper on the T2K data. The data provide further evidence that there could be some slight asymmetries between normal matter and antimatter, perhaps enough to explain why the universe today is almost exclusively made of matter. But Nobel laureate Samuel Ting, the principal investigator of the AMS experiment, says we need more data to truly say antimatter isn’t out there somewhere. “This neutrino experiment only says, ‘From Earth, we observe in space more matter than antimatter,’ ” he says. “It does not say, ‘Antimatter disappeared.’ ” Ting’s views may not represent the majority opinion among scientists, but the physicist is undaunted: “If you don’t look, then really you will never know.” — NATHANIEL SCHARPING

J U N E 2 0 2 1 . D I S C OVER

Looking Into Lithium-Ion Batteries THE POWER SURGING THROUGH THESE RECHARGEABLE BATTERIES DEPENDS ON INTRICATE CRYSTAL TOWERS THAT OPERATE LIKE JENGA — SORT OF. Lithium-ion batteries: They’re in almost every phone and laptop, they’re powering zero-emission transportation, and they’re making it easier to transition to wind and solar energy. Let’s demystify how these ubiquitous black boxes store energy — and why they can’t last forever. Every battery has two core parts, an oxide electrode and a graphite electrode. The two electrodes are arranged in symmetrical, layered crystals.

D I S C O V E R M A G A Z I N E .C O M

You can think of each as a Jenga tower whose stability comes from crisscrossing blocks. Rather than wood blocks, every other layer in the graphite electrode tower would be graphite; in the oxide electrode tower, it would be metal oxide. The remaining blocks would be ions of a soft metal called lithium, one of earth’s most widespread elements. In a lithium-ion battery, these ions move between the two electrodes. When you charge your battery, electricity causes the lithium

ions and an electron from the oxide electrode to move to the layers of the graphite electrode. When you use your phone or electric car, those electrons power an electric charge as they, along with the lithium ions, now naturally move back to the layers of the oxide electrode. Imagine you’ve plugged your battery into an outlet to charge. The negative charges of electricity attract positively charged

lithium ions to the graphite electrode. If you picture your battery as Jenga towers, you’d start with several empty spaces in the graphite electrode tower. Then, as the graphite electrode attracts the lithium ions, you slide out the lithium blocks from the oxide electrode tower and into the graphite electrode tower. Once all the spaces are used up on the graphite electrode, your battery is fully charged.

FROM TOP: ANWEBER/DREAMSTIME; ANTON STARIKOV/SHUTTERSTOCK

HOT SCIENCE

Oxide Electrode

Graphite Electrode

WHATEVER HAPPENED TO THE HOLE IN THE OZONE LAYER?

FROM LETT: LIZZIE DRISCOLL/UNIVERSITY OF BIRMINGHAM; CRYSTAL-K/SHUTTERSTOCK

Each time you slide blocks into a Jenga tower, other blocks shift. Similarly, when lithium travels between the oxide and graphite electrodes, it distorts the neat layers around it. Eventually, the spaces where lithium once fit are no longer stable, and your battery begins to lose its ability to store energy. Elizabeth Driscoll, a chemistry Ph.D. student at the

University of Birmingham, uses Jenga to teach battery science. Overeager students who move blocks too quickly, she says, exemplify what happens when you charge a lithium-ion battery too fast: The electrodes collapse and can no longer hold lithium. If lithium can’t move, the battery can’t store energy and it’s time to buy a new one. — IAN MORSE

lmost 40 years ago, scientists found a hole in the ozone layer over Antarctica. Ozone molecules absorb UV radiation, acting as a sunscreen for life on Earth. Certain substances — especially chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs), once emitted by refrigerators and air conditioners — destroy ozone molecules in our atmosphere. That’s why, in 1987, the United Nations established the Montreal Protocol to regulate CFCs. Did the treaty fix the ozone hole? Yes and no. THE DISCOVERY Concentrations of CFCs OF THE OZONE in the atmosphere have HOLE SHOCKED significantly declined. But they’re not gone for THE WORLD good. Stephen Montzka, AND PROPELLED a research chemist at NATIONS the National Oceanic INTO ACTION. and Atmospheric DECADES LATER, Administration, says WHERE DOES they’ve detected levels of THE PROBLEM CFCs in the atmosphere STAND? that indicate possible unauthorized industrial production. These could delay the ozone layer’s recovery, but they don’t mean game over. “The enhanced levels of CFC-11 that we have noted in the atmosphere represent an amount that will not by itself cause substantial additional harm to the ozone layer if those levels diminish and return to [expected amounts] quickly,” he says. — BÁRBARA PINHO J U N E 2 0 2 1 . D IS C OVER

HOT SCIENCE

Solomon David — he’s the one smiling on the right — studies gar, an odd fish he hopes will revolutionize research.

The gar’s ancestors ﬁrst appeared around 157 million years ago, even before the Tyrannosaurus rex.

The One-Man Gar Fanclub MEET THE BIOLOGIST WHO WANTS YOU TO LOVE PREHISTORIC FISH AS MUCH AS HE DOES.

harp teeth and pointy snouts plaster the walls and bookshelves of Solomon David’s office at Nicholls State University, nested among the bayous of southern Louisiana. It’s like walking into a gar museum — perhaps

the only such in the world. The prehistoric fish that adorns the walls looks like an alligator that has fins instead of feet, a long, narrow snout and armored, diamond-shaped scales. A small stuffed animal gar, custom made from a woman in the U.K. who makes scientifically accurate paleo plushies, sits behind David’s computer chair. Multiple gars from Mexico are mounted on the walls; there, gar is a regional delicacy known locally as pejelagarto — a portmanteau of the Spanish words for “fish” and “lizard.” Next to a whiteboard hangs a

D I S C O V E R M A G A Z I N E .C O M

framed spread depicting a gar swimming in a river, from the children’s magazine Ranger Rick. David sits in middle of this ad-hoc gar display, a lively researcher in his early 40s whose hands move almost as fast as his mouth. His enthusiasm for primitive fishes — living representatives of ancient lineages that were around hundreds of millions of years ago — is infectious. But David wasn’t always interested in prehistoric fishes; it was dinosaurs that initially gripped his interest. “I was always into the

more unusual-looking organisms,” he remembers. When he moved from North Dakota to Ohio as a child, he happened upon an issue of a nature magazine — the very same Ranger Rick now adorning his office wall. In the middle of the magazine was one of the most unusual organisms he had seen. He was fascinated to find out that these dinosaur-looking gar fish were real, present-day creatures. He built a career out of that fascination — which has only benefited the gar. Historically somewhat of an underdog fish, the gar’s fearsome looks and indiscriminate feeding habits have given it a bad reputation among sport anglers and wildlife officials. “In certain states, if you caught a gar, you were not allowed to return it back to the water alive,” David says. “You were required by law to kill it because people thought that they were ruining the habitat or the population of other game fish like largemouth bass or perch.” In Iowa, for

FROM LEFT: COURTESY SOLOMON DAVID; SARAH SAX; SOLOMON DAVID (2)

instance, this law remained in effect through the 1980s. But the gar, which scientists including Charles Darwin have referred to as a “living fossil,” has many traits useful for research into human and ecosystem health. David is determined to make sure the rest of the world knows about them. David runs down a list of interesting facts about the gar: Their ancestors first appeared around 157 million years ago during the late Jurassic period, even before the Tyrannosaurus rex. They have retained certain characteristics that don’t exist in other modern-day fish, such as salmon — for example, their chainmail-like armor of thick scales. And they are genetically much closer to humans than other fish species, such as zebrafish, which David calls the “lab rats” of fish in biomedical research. This last point is especially important; using gar for medical research could potentially open up a slew of interesting insights into human development and disease formation. David is working with evolutionary scientists to help make gars a viable model species for scientific research. With a team of (almost) equally enthusiastic graduate students, David is figuring out ways to more efficiently breed gars in the laboratory to gain a better supply of gars and gar embryos. While species of the fish exist as far north as Canada, wild populations of gar prefer slow-moving, often brackish

The spotted gar is one of seven species worldwide. It lives across a wide swath of North America.

rivers, and are abundant in the floodplains and bayous that surround the university. “Louisiana has this vast natural resource concentrated here that you don’t get in a lot of other places,” David says. “We are kind of like the boots on the ground. We get out there, we can get the fish, and we can send those embryos out to other labs.” While acceptance of gar as a natural and important part of the ecosystem is growing, some species, like the larger alligator gar, are still threatened or even endangered in some states. Outside of his official research, David’s enthusiasm is channeled into educating the general

public about the awesomeness of these prehistoric fishes. And like many scientists, David is guilty of taking his work home — except in his case, he does it quite literally. Today, his home aquarium houses all the different species of gar, from the 2-foot-long spotted gar to the alligator gar, which can grow to more than 8 feet in length. At one point, he was keeping the fish in a room that was later converted to his daughter’s nursery. “My wife and I used to joke that she was probably the only person to ever grow up with all seven species of gars in the room,” he says. If David has his way, she will not be the last. — SARAH SAX J U N E 2 02 1 . D IS C OV ER

HOT SCIENCE

DOG, YAWN IT! If you ever find yourself yawning during a long Zoom video call, you may soon see yawns spread to the other faces on your screen. Your pet under the desk may even join in. Yawns are contagious, even between dogs and humans, as Discover reported in 2008 and again in 2012. At the time, empathy — the ability to put yourself in another’s shoes — was one of scientists’ most probable explanations, since dogs have been selectively bred to be our companions over millennia. But emerging evidence suggests this reasoning is wrong. To get a better glimpse inside your dog’s mind, researchers examined whether canine contagious

Researchers thought the reason dogs caught yawns from humans was empathy. But when put to the test, the idea didn’t hold up.

yawning follows the same behavioral patterns that empathetic yawning does in humans. For instance, people are both more empathetic toward and likely to contagiously yawn with friends and families than with strangers — what researchers call the familiarity bias. There’s a gender bias as well: Women, on average, report greater feelings of empathy than men, and catch yawns more frequently. But earlier this year, when researchers at the University of Auckland in New Zealand analyzed previous studies of contagious yawning in dogs, they found no sign of these biases. While dogs do catch yawns from humans — even from audio recordings — results are mixed on whether they’re more likely to yawn after a familiar human does

than a stranger. Likewise, male dogs yawned just as much as females. The researchers added an empathy test of their own: How often do dogs catch yawns from humans who are nice — or not so nice — to them? In the study, an experimenter would either play with or pet the dog, or blatantly ignore the dog and avoid all eye contact. The anti-social experimenter would also show the dog a treat and command it to perform a trick — and then eat the treat themselves. But this did not affect the dogs’ yawning susceptibility. They caught yawns from both nice and anti-social experimenters. Because they don’t share the same patterns, it seems that contagious yawning is not a sign of empathy in dogs.

It’s still unclear why we yawn in the first place. One hypothesis is that yawning is a stress response that increases alertness by increasing blood flow to the brain and cooling it. Having yawns spread could help coordinate a group’s alertness, says Alex Taylor, an evolutionary psychologist and the University of Auckland study’s senior author. However, this “is one nice evolutionary story that we don’t have that much evidence for,” he says. This isn’t to say your dog doesn’t have empathy at all. Instead, the study shows that “animal minds are still a mystery,” Taylor says. “We don’t know what your dog is thinking.” — RICHARD SIMA

The researchers added an empathy test of their own: How often do dogs catch yawns from humans who are nice — or not so nice — to them?

D I S C O V E R M A G A Z I N E .C O M

FROM TOP: WAYHOME STUDIO/SHUTTERSTOCK; PRZEMEK ICIAK/SHUTTERSTOCK

YOUR POOCH MAY YAWN WHEN YOU DO, BUT THAT’S NOT EMPATHY.

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HOT SCIENCE

WHAT WE’RE READING

More Pages to Turn

The God Equation: The Quest for a Theory of Everything

Drunk: How We Sipped, Danced, and Stumbled Our Way to Civilization

By Michio Kaku

By Edward Slingerland

Within the first few lines, Drunk will have you snorting beer out of your nose. Slingerland’s rich brew of history, anthropology, neuroscience and chemistry tackles one of humanity’s most perplexing paradoxes: our thirst for a low-grade poison that wreaks havoc on our brains and bodies. There’s even splashes of practical, realworld advice, like how to bring booze into professional gatherings without excluding nondrinkers. Slingerland’s thoughtful deep dive is both illuminating and, fittingly, intoxicating.

D I S C O V E R M A G A Z I N E .C O M

Empire of Ants: The Hidden Worlds and Extraordinary Lives of Earth’s Tiny Conquerors By Susanne Foitzik and Olaf Fritsche; translated by Ayça Türkoğlu Have you ever wondered what goes on in the miniature world right outside your window? Biologist Foitzik teams up with journalist Fritsche to zoom in — sometimes literally, with gorgeous color photography — on these intriguing insects. The book is brimming with fascinating facts, such as that bullet ants give the most painful stings on record or that leafcutter ants don’t actually eat leaves. Empire of Ants will give you a newfound appreciation for the pint-sized civilizations thriving right in your backyard. — A.O.

WATCH LIST

Human Nature

Directed by Adam Bolt

This documentary on CRISPR, the game-changing gene-editing technology, was first released in 2019. But what better time to revisit than now, in light of biochemist Jennifer Doudna and microbiologist Emmanuelle Charpentier, two of CRISPR’s creators, winning the 2020 Nobel Prize in Chemistry? The film features a cavalcade of experts excitedly recounting how the tech came to be and its implications for the future. If you’re curious about genetics or biotechnology and have 90 minutes to spare, this densely packed doc, available on both PBS Passport and Netflix, is well worth your time. — A.O.

CLOCKWISE FROM LEFT: PENGUIN RANDOM HOUSE; LITTLE, BROWN SPARK/HACHETTE BOOK GROUP; WORKMAN PUBLISHING; WONDER COLLABORATIVE

hen I was a college student in the late 2000s, I wasn’t all that interested in reading about science. That all changed when I picked up theoretical physicist Michio Kaku’s Physics of the Impossible. As he explored the plausibility of science fiction concepts like death rays, force fields and time travel, it was like a switch flipped on in my brain. Suddenly, topics that had felt boring or inscrutable, like theoretical physics, became compelling and accessible. That same electricity suffuses Kaku’s latest book, which takes on another mindbending topic: the search for a mathematical formula that would combine all the known forces in the universe into a single theory. Such an equation, he argues, would illuminate some of science’s greatest mysteries, like what came before the Big Bang and the possibility of parallel universes. The sprawling tale begins in ancient Greece, with the origin of atomic theory. Then, Kaku fast-forwards to chronicle the exploration of other theories that forever changed the world, like Newton’s laws of motion and gravity and quantum mechanics, before unraveling his leading candidate for this unifying formula — string theory, a field he has made significant contributions to since the 1970s. It’s a delight to read Kaku’s saga of major milestones throughout this quest, like the so-called “battle of the currents” between Thomas Edison and Nikola Tesla, in sweeping, operatic terms. But, ultimately, it’s Kaku’s ability to take ideas that defy comprehension and render them with utter clarity that makes this book a must-read. — ALEX ORLANDO

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VITAL SIGNS

Spin Doctor NOT ALL CASES OF VERTIGO ARE CREATED EQUAL. WAS THIS WOMAN’S DIZZINESS FROM A HARMLESS INNER-EAR IMBALANCE — OR SOMETHING MUCH MORE SERIOUS?

he stately woman in the buttoned-up nightgown looked on as Iris, my second-year resident, related the history. “Ms. Baker is a 60-year-old in good health,” she began. “Only takes a blood pressure pill. Early this morning, the room suddenly started spinning and she retched once. Denies headache, neck pain, arm or leg weakness or vision change. Says her face feels tingly on the left. On the physical exam, she drifted to the left when I had her walk.” “Any tingling or numbness on the right arm or leg?” I asked. “I didn’t ask,” Iris replied. “Could be a Wallenberg,” I said. She pursed her lips. “The actor?” “Ha. Wallenberg, not Wahlberg. It’s a type of stroke. Lateral medullary infarct.” A stroke is caused by blockage or rupture of a blood vessel in the brain; an “infarct,” or infarction, is blockage caused by a clot. “Never heard of it,” she answered truthfully. “Let’s take a look.” At Ms. Baker’s bedside, I introduced myself then asked, “Any numbness or tingling over your right arm or leg?”

D I S C O V E R M A G A Z I N E .C O M

My snap diagnosis — that Ms. Baker had suffered a rare type of stroke in her lateral medulla — was looking shaky.

“No,” she answered. Gently, I pressed a needle onto the skin of her right biceps, then forearm. “Feel that?” I asked. “Yes,” she replied briskly. My snap diagnosis — that Ms. Baker had suffered a rare type of stroke in her lateral medulla — was looking shaky. I probed both sides of her face. “Any difference between left and right?” I inquired. “Left side seems duller,” she replied. “Maybe a partial stroke?” I mused to Iris. “Wallenberg syndrome is vertigo plus loss of pain and temperature sensation on half the face and the opposite side of the body. Only her face seems affected. Another possibility: Vertigo can make you hyperventilate, which can also make you numb. I’d still get an MRI.” “Someday I’ll figure out vertigo,” Iris sighed. “Easy,” I said ruefully. “You just need to figure out whether the cause is central or peripheral, brain versus inner ear, stroke versus positional vertigo. One of the toughest calls in neurology.”

KELLIE JAEGER/DISCOVER

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VITAL SIGNS

Navigating three-dimensional space against the pull of the planet’s gravitational field demands finely tuned gyroscopes hitched to hair-trigger reflexes. Vertigo is what happens when these gyroscopes — or the nerves that carry their signals, or their relay stations inside the brain — misfire. Latin for “turn,” it is a dramatically unpleasant sensation that shapeshifts terra firma into a roiling, retch-inducing sea. As a medical student, my first anatomy-lab glimpse of the inner ear’s gyroscopes left me dazzled. Nestled within the bony ridge just inside the middle ear, the three semi-circular canals protrude at right angles to each other off a central sac, the utricle, like handles on a surrealist coffee mug. Inside, a gelatinous fluid bathes hair cells primed to detect rotary motion. Turning your head left makes the fluid rotate clockwise relative to the hair cells. That triggers cells in the left ear to fire stronger signals — and those on the right weaker ones — into the vestibular nerve to the brainstem. Essentially, left and right gyroscope signals must complement each other to tell the brain which way it is turning so it can coordinate muscles throughout the body. Linear motion is detected by the utricle and its partner bulge, the saccule. Here, the hair cells sport tiny rocklike particles, or otoliths, at their tips to amplify sway when the head accelerates forward or back. This sets up a curious and all-too-common problem: If an otolith floats out of the utricle to a semicircular canal, it can trigger the wrong hair cell. The mixed signal — one ear blasting, “We’re moving!” while the other whispers, “No, we’re not” — unleashes the whirling sensation of benign paroxysmal positional vertigo. Happily, the Epley

D IS C O V E R M A G A Z I N E .C O M

Years ago, as a stroke center director, I reviewed more than a thousand cases. Vertigo proved our greatest challenge.

ONE BAD ACTOR Ms. Baker seemed pretty comfortable, so I asked her to look left. Her eyes jerked left for about 20 seconds, then stopped. To the right, they seemed normal. When she walked, she drifted left, but didn’t fall.

KELLIE JAEGER/DISCOVER

A BALANCING ACT

maneuver, a series of head-turning movements, can diminish the vertigo by enlisting gravity to coax a wayward otolith back into the utricle. Benign, however, does not apply to all causes of vertigo — notably strokes and tumors. All that fine-tuning among inner ears, eyes, limbs, trunk and head — and between incoming sensory data and outgoing commands — takes endless crosstalk. The highways of the nervous system converge at the medulla, the lowest part of the brainstem, which sits atop the spinal cord. Less than an inch in diameter, it also lies in front of the cerebellum, the body’s coordination center that chatters constantly with the inner ears. A stroke anywhere along those signaling pathways can cause vertigo by disrupting this cross-communication — and that all-important balancing act between left and right. The trick is to tell the vertigos apart. Years ago, as a stroke center director, I reviewed more than a thousand cases. Vertigo proved our greatest challenge. Brainstem or cerebellar strokes often lack the arm or leg weakness, or speech deficit, that usually come with a “classic” stroke. This can make those cases devilishly hard to pluck out from the steady stream of benign vertigo patients. Vertigo-inducing strokes are subtle, but uniquely dangerous. Within the cerebellum, a hemorrhagic stroke can quickly expand to crush the brainstem; an ischemic stroke can cause neurons to swell over the next 48 hours to the same result. Patients look mildly impaired, then abruptly die. In the tightly packed brainstem, a small stroke can quickly worsen if treatment is delayed. Accurate diagnosis relies on tests of eye movement, limb coordination, and above all, gait. Problem is, when you have the whirlies, all you want to do is shut your eyes and lie still. Worse, the severity of the vertigo predicts nothing. If a patient won’t (or can’t) walk, you can fall back on the eye exam. The gyroscopes help the eyes adjust to head movement. If one inner ear or its nerve goes out, then the eyes will drift to that side before being yanked back by the higher brain. The involuntary eyeball movement is called nystagmus. With a stroke, the central left-right integration system gets hit, so the nystagmus goes both ways.

“If it’s a stroke, she looks pretty good,” Iris pointed out back at the doctors’ station. “Could be a partial,” I said. The cerebellum sits behind the brain-to-spinalcord motor and sensory pathways. The medulla is the intersection. Pure cerebellar strokes shouldn’t cause numbness or weakness. In the outer medulla, however, the input from the inner ear’s vestibular nerve happens to lie very close to pain fibers from the face and the opposite side of the body. Separate nerve bundles carry sensations of light touch and vibration, and others carry motor signals, but these lie toward the center. That makes it possible for a small arterial blockage to the outer lateral medulla to cause both vertigo and loss of pain and temperature sensation: Wallenberg syndrome, named after the German neuroscientist who first diagnosed it in 1895. The larger the stroke, the more nerve pathways get hit. Swallowing, speaking, and even heart rate may all be affected, but by then the diagnosis should be obvious. It’s very important to catch the small strokes.

It’s very important to catch the small strokes. I’ve seen radiologists miss Wallenberg syndrome.

I’ve seen radiologists miss Wallenberg syndrome. The medulla is only about three-quarters of an inch across, and the dot of abnormality on an MRI can be hard to see. A “negative” MRI can lead to inadequate treatment for a stroke that’s likely to get worse, so we specifically alerted our radiologist to look for it. “The MRI will take some hours,” I told Iris. “Do you want to give aspirin in the meantime?” By decreasing platelet stickiness, aspirin prevents new, larger blood-clot strokes. Four hours later, the radiologist called, “Your patient has a stroke. It’s there, infarct at the left lateral medulla. A Wallenberg,” she told us. Iris smiled. “Not the actor, right?” “Oh, it’s an actor, all right,” I told her. We filled Ms. Baker in. With the full-court press of stroke medications and physical therapy, she would likely do very well. D Tony Dajer is an emergency medicine physician in New York City. The cases described in Vital Signs are real, but names and certain details have been changed.

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love the word discombobulated. That’s partly because I came to it late. Although the term dates back to at least the 19th century, I don’t recall ever hearing it before 2016. Just trying to utter it aloud perfectly encapsulates its meaning (confused and disconcerted). I usually get about halfway through, to the bob, then lose track of what I’m saying. I don’t think I have ever pronounced discombobulated the same precise way twice. And I always feel a slight sense of relief when I reach the ed without screwing it up, without showing my inner discombobulation. Most words have no apparent connection to what they signify. As the linguist Steven Pinker puts it, we call a dog “dog” because everyone else does. And that’s how it has to be. It would overwhelm our senses if every word we spoke or heard came with deeper semantic meaning.

D IS C O V E R M A G A Z I N E .C O M

Try to shout the word whisper. Weird, right?

That rule applies to most words, but not all. The words pop and murmur sound like they, well, sound. Try to shout the word whisper. Weird, right? Such onomatopoeic terms demonstrate what researchers call sound iconicity, or a resemblance between a word’s form and meaning. Pinker and others argue that iconicity is rare in language, but plenty of psychologists and linguists disagree. The debate has swung back and forth through the ages. In the fourth century B.C., the Greek philosopher Plato wrote that certain words seemed particularly suitable to their meaning. Numerous words support his case. For example, if we assume that the made-up words mal and mil can both mean table, then which of the two do you think best describes a large table? You likely said mal — along with 75 to 96 percent of people in a classic study that discovered the effect in 1929. It seems more natural to associate

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the names of large animals, for example, with low-pitched sounds: say, elephant, compared with mouse. One classic finding, tested across decades and cultures, shows that people overwhelmingly associate the made-up words bouba with a round shape and kiki with a sharp and angular one.

SOUNDS LIKE NONSENSE Unfamiliar and free of linguistic baggage, made-up words help scientists investigate iconicity. Drawing helps too. In trials and tests asking people to interpret the meaning of made-up words visually, researchers can free volunteers from the constraints of trying to squeeze these inferred meanings into words of their own. In a unique 2019 study, psychologists combined the two ideas. A team tested how volunteers interpreted the meaning of nonsense words. They asked the volunteers to attribute characteristics to and draw pictures of imaginary creatures, such as a horgous, a keex, a bomburg and a cougzer. “We wanted to see to what extent people actually take these iconic properties of words and infuse them into novel representations of the world, or novel representations of creatures and objects,” research team member Charles Davis, of the University of Connecticut, explains.

D I S C O V E R M A G A Z I N E .C O M

Even people unfamiliar with the story judge that Oliver Twist is likable and Fagin is not.

The psychologists presented adjectives — round, spiky, large, small, masculine and feminine — that the volunteers had to match with 24 nonsense words. The scientists then picked the top 12 words that got the most consistent and unique descriptions. Most people rated an ackie and gricker as small, an ambous as round, an axittic and cruckwic as sharp and a heonia as feminine. Another group of volunteers then drew pictures of animals inspired by these names. When a third group examined these drawings, and the possible names associated with them, they mostly made a match. Not every time, of course, but they did so more often than chance would predict. It wasn’t a matter of drawing skills, Davis says. “Some of them were really outstanding. Really impressive artwork,” he says. “Others, less so.” He sent me the drawings and I can see what he means. I’m no artist, and clearly neither were some of these volunteers. Some attempts are best described as abstract, though to be fair it’s not an easy task. “There are definitely differences in the degree to which people are able to represent these properties,” Davis adds. For instance, one drew a boodoma as a large-breasted creature. Another interpreted the same word to be a sad-looking ladybug. While the pictures can appear a little random, look at enough of them and certain patterns or themes seem to emerge. Most people drew a keex as smaller and spikier than a horgous, for example.

NAMES AND PERSONALITIES Beyond the quirky experiment, these findings have far-reaching implications for human interaction. Maybe you’re a soon-to-be parent choosing a baby name. If people expect a horgous to be big and a keex to be small, what does that mean for every Pam, Dick or Harry? Could our names influence the way people view and behave towards us? Yes, says Penny Pexman, a psychologist at the

FROM LEFT: KELLIE JAEGER/DISCOVER; COURTESY OF CHARLES DAVIS (4)

PIECE OF MIND

David Adam is a freelance journalist based near London. He writes about science, medicine and the mysteries of the human mind — including his own.

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NAME THE CREATURE

These are actual drawings from participants in a 2019 study about nonsense words. The volunteers were asked to portray a so-called keex and horgous, among other made-up words. Take a guess: Which creatures above are a keex? Which ones are a horgous? In the study, many people made correct matches. Answer: horgous: a) and b); keex: c) and d).

University of Calgary in Canada. In a series of studies, she has shown we tend to expect people to have specific character traits based on how their name sounds. Just like the nonsense words, people associate the “round” sounds in people’s names with one set of characteristics, and names featuring “sharp” sounds with a very different set. “They think that Anne tends to be conscientious and hardworking and sensitive,” Pexman says. “Kate is expected to be extroverted and less conscientious, less hardworking, less agreeable.” I asked her about David — for purely journalistic reasons, of course. “David is closer to the round end,” she says. That would make me hardworking and sensitive. I was a little surprised; my wife, even more so. But who am I to argue with science? Importantly, surveys suggest that the link exists only in the mind of the person making it. There is no evidence that the Kates of the world are more extroverted than the Annes. “You could construct a little bit of a farfetched scenario where people start to look like their names over time and maybe people’s personalities start to match their names through some sort of congruency. But, luckily, we did not find that,” Pexman says. There’s also no evidence that people are basing their judgments on people they met previously — say, Kate, your former work colleague who was a bit of a slacker. “We don’t think it’s about particular exemplars,” adds Pexman. Writers such as Charles Dickens knew the value of iconicity in character names to emphasize their personalities. Research shows even people unfamiliar with the story judge that Oliver Twist is likable and Fagin is not. Pexman is now working on a study to see how people’s names could affect their chances of being chosen for a job after an interview. “We have videos of people being interviewed for jobs and we will manipulate the names of those candidates before others evaluate them,” she says. “What’s in a name?” William Shakespeare asked us in Romeo and Juliet. “That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet.” Well, perhaps not. D

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From Bigfoot to the anti-vaccine movement, fringe theories are everywhere, lingering in the shadow of science. Where do they come from? magine a universe rife with cosmic catastrophes: Jupiter ejecting a comet into space that would later become the planet Venus. The comet whizzing past Earth and changing its rotation. The resulting chaos on Earth causing natural disasters of biblical proportions — literally — like the parting of the Red Sea. In the mid-1900s, Immanuel Velikovsky, a psychiatrist and author, claimed that he could prove these radical ideas.

Cryptozoology is a type of fringe science that attempts to prove the existence of creatures from folklore, such as Bigfoot.

Velikovsky laid out his case in Worlds in Collision, a 1950 bestseller. But the book wasn’t billed as creative fiction or a fanciful hypothesis based on anecdotal accounts of the past; rather, Velikovsky presented these interplanetary theories, and others, as factual. Many scientists didn’t buy it. “That this is a remarkable story no one — proponents and opponents alike — will disagree,” Carl Sagan wrote in response to Worlds in Collision. “Whether it is a likely story is, fortunately, amenable to scientific inquiry.” And inquire scientists did. Many pointed out that Velikovsky’s evidence ran counter to centuries of established astronomy and physics knowledge. His arguments were based on historical texts and legends. The whole affair reignited questions about what’s science and what’s pseudoscience — a discussion that precedes the coining of the latter word in 1796. You don’t have to look far to find ideas that seem scientific, but aren’t — think of astrology, flat-Earth theory, or the antivaccine movement, for starters. But how do we know when an idea is rooted in scientific fact, and when it’s a mirage? It can be tricky to tell. The wide umbrella of pseudoscience encompasses ideas that come from a variety of sources, and they generally have little in common except that they’ve been designated as such by members of the scientific community. “Part of the reason why the fringe is so crazily diverse is because science is pretty crazily diverse,” says Michael Gordin, a Princeton University historian. In his view, these are ideas that linger in the shadow of science. This hints at the complicated relationship between In his 1950 bestseller, scientific establishment and the fringes. Worlds in Collision, psychiatrist Immanuel Fittingly, another term for these schools of Velikovsky claimed thought is fringe science — one that Gordin that a piece of Jupiter hurtled past Earth, changing its rotation.

prefers, after researching fringe theories since the late 1990s. Many fringe ideas aren’t inherently dangerous, but in some cases, they spark valid concern from scientists, such as the claim that COVID-19 vaccines can alter your DNA. When unfounded and false information is presented as scientific to skew the truth or blatantly lie, it can cause real damage in the world. “There are some fringe doctrines where we have very good reasons to be antagonistic [towards them],” Gordin says. But he also explains that it’s not the theories themselves that are the problem; it’s that they look true, but aren’t. Fringe groups will wield bias-affirming data, anecdotal evidence and the testimonies of people with academic credentials to make a convincing case. Even when these ideas aren’t rooted in facts, many people still latch on to fringe theories — and, in some cases, deny contradictory evidence — due to powerful emotional, political and cultural influences.

PREVIOUS SPREAD: CINEBLADE/SHUTTERSTOCK. TOP LEFT: HALFPOINT/SHUTTERSTOCK. PORTRAIT: BETTMANN/GETTY

Lots of fringe theories don’t pose any danger. But others, like the false notion that COVID-19 vaccines can change your DNA, can cause real harm.

VIACHESLAV LOPATIN/SHUTTERSTOCK

A TAXONOMY OF FRINGE While it might be tempting to lump every fringe idea into one category and every scientific idea into another, the theories seldom fit into tidy boxes. And there is no single, universal way they arise. Take Bigfoot, for example. While myths of wild, humanlike creatures are present in cultures around the world, a newspaper columnist in the U.S. was the first to use the name when writing about Northern California loggers who spotted mysteriously large footprints in the woods. Despite that those footprints came from a jokester making marks in the mud with giant wooden feet, people continued to present videos and even corpses aimed at proving the creature’s existence. Today, cryptozoologists search for evidence of mythological creatures using their own methods, taking Bigfoot from folklore to pseudoscience. On the other hand, astrology and alchemy were once seen as legitimate scientific fields before drifting

to the fringe as understanding about the natural world progressed. “The easy example of how we tell what is and what isn’t pseudoscience is astrology,” says Kean University historian Brian Regal. “It’s viewed as pseudoscience, in part, because it has never really evolved over time.” As astrology and alchemy suggest, the barrier between science and fringe isn’t a brick wall; ideas previously regarded as scientific have been disproved and dismissed. And in some rare cases, theories that were once disregarded have gained peer-reviewed evidence and support by the scientific establishment. Atomic theory, for example, was once part of the fringe. Though scholars had theorized since the days of ancient Greece and India that atoms existed, for centuries, the prevailing idea was that matter was continuous — essentially, you could keep breaking it down into smaller and smaller pieces forever. It wasn’t until the 1800s that scientists began to record

In astrology, zodiac signs, like those above, are supposed to help devotees draw connections between celestial movements and human activity.

J U N E 2 02 1 . D I S C OV ER

concrete evidence for the existence of atoms, and more and more research built onto that idea until the theory became widely accepted. Other scientific ideas we consider common sense today weren’t always respected. Physicist Galileo Galilei triggered the wrath of the Catholic Church and scathing rebuke from his 17th-century astronomy peers for proposing that Earth revolved around the sun. That’s also roughly the same time period when Europeans were in the midst of the Scientific Revolution. Though the roots of mathematics, chemistry and astronomy date back to ancient civilizations across the globe, Galileo and his peers began to codify the scientific method and lay the groundwork for modern research institutions. “That’s when you start to get this notion of pseudoscience,” Regal says, “because you get people who

are now going to be operating outside of that sort of growing community of researchers and scholars.” The establishment of modern science created a barrier between insiders and outsiders. And it’s important to note how science has routinely dismissed certain groups of people, or actively pushed them to the margins. Researchers, for example, have historically skewed male and white, often overlooking diversity in race or sexual orientation. Even for Velikovsky, part of his support as a charismatic figure in the 1960s and ’70s stemmed from the tension between fringe and mainstream. He was standing up against the “elites’’ at a time when anti-establishment politics were especially popular, explains Gordin in his 2012 book, The Pseudoscience Wars. Followers latched on to his outsider status. But the non-scientific method plaguing Velikovsky and his followers — and much of

THE FLUID NATURE OF SCIENCE CAN LEAD TO FRINGE THINKING, BECAUSE PEOPLE TEND TO LATCH ONTO WHICHEVER FINDING APPEALS TO THEM MOST. EVEN IF THAT SPECIFIC PART IS LATER DEBUNKED, THEY STILL MIGHT LIKE IT AND HOLD ONTO IT ANYWAY. 34

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TOPICAL PRESS AGENCY/GETTY

U.S. shops in the 1800s offered phrenology readings, the practice of examining someone’s skull to determine their intellect and personality. The bunk science fueled racist ideas for decades.

pseudoscience today — was a reluctance to modify their ideas when presented with opposing views and evidence. Instead, they clung to them even more tightly. That absolutist, all-or-nothing attitude is central to building a fringe movement. And it opposes how science is supposed to work.

NASA/JHU APL/SWRI/ALEX PARKER

HOLDING ON TO THE PAST Whatever you read in your school textbooks decades ago likely contained outdated knowledge, even if the facts seemed rock solid at the time. And that basic notion of change can be uncomfortable for many. “Most people think science is a body of doctrine that’s static,” Gordin says. “We figure out something, it’s true, and we put it on the shelf.” But that’s not the case. Scientists are constantly revising their knowledge through new studies, data and discussions. “Stuff that you grew up thinking was true turns out not to be,” he adds. “And that disrupts people’s faith in science.” Consider, for a moment, Pluto. You may have some strong feelings about the downgraded planet; many people certainly did when the iconic celestial body was reclassified as a dwarf planet in 2006. A panel of 424 astronomers, less than 5 percent of all in the profession across the world, voted to change Pluto’s standing based on new criteria for what makes a planet. The controversial recategorization is the official stance of the International Astronomical Union today, even though some astronomers still disagree on what, exactly, Pluto should be called. “The scientific consensus shifts over time because people are constantly picking at it,” Gordin says. “And that’s supposed to be science working as normal, but it has this byproduct.” The incremental, fluid nature of science can lead to fringe thinking, he reasons, because people tend to latch onto whichever finding appeals to them most. Even if that specific part is later debunked, they still might like it and hold onto it anyway. One textbook example is the repeatedly debunked claim that the MMR vaccine causes autism. The idea first arose in 1998 when former physician Andrew Wakefield and colleagues published a paper in The Lancet, alleging a causal relationship. The journal retracted the study 12 years after it was published when Wakefield and colleagues were found to have deliberately fabricated evidence for financial gain. In the aftermath of the initial report, though, entire communities began to stop vaccinating their children. Even though scientific reports have shown, over and over again, that there is no causal relationship between vaccines and autism, the damage has been done. Today, anti-vaccine groups abound, and once-eradicated diseases are making

a comeback as large clusters of people continue to shun vaccination efforts.

EXPERTS AND FAKES It may seem surprising, but the actual techniques and communication strategies fringe scientists employ can confirm humanity’s basic trust in the scientific method. Exploiting that trust to spread false information is exactly how some fringe theorists get people to believe them. One common technique, explains John Cook, a communication researcher at the Monash Climate Change Communication Research Hub at Monash University in Australia, is relying on fake experts to give the impression that a message is scientifically credible. Fake experts are those with academic credentials who, at first glance, seem qualified to speak on an issue. Maybe they have a “Ph.D.” or “Dr.” in their title. But their credentials don’t match or they lack the expertise in the area of science being discussed. Essentially, someone with a doctorate in psychiatry isn’t necessarily qualified to offer expert insight on astronomy.

The reclassification of Pluto from planet to dwarf planet is a striking example of how scientific consensus can evolve over time.

SPOTTING PSEUDOSCIENCE So, how can you tell the difference between science and theories on the fringe? The debate has raged in philosophical circles for centuries, but there are some tangible traits that most pseudoscientific theories have in common. Historian Brian Regal teaches courses on scientific and pseudoscientific history at Kean University in New Jersey. He breaks down pseudoscience into five traits, the first being that these theories don’t advance or evolve over time. “If you take what an astrologer is doing today,” Regal explains, “And compare it to what Albertus Magnus was doing back in the Middle Ages or any of the famous astrologers from that time, what they’re doing really isn’t that much different.” Similarly, pseudoscientific theories do not

present any testable evidence, and you can’t prove or disprove the theories. Science, by contrast, relies on the verification of evidence to prove or disprove ideas. As new data comes in, things that previously seemed true can be proven false. And supporters of pseudoscientific theories are often unwilling to accept contrary evidence. Think of the so-called “anti-vax” movement: Even though it’s been repeatedly proven that vaccines don’t cause autism, some people still refuse to accept that evidence. Finally, pseudoscience is often based on belief alone. No matter how many times scientists debunk purported evidence of Bigfoot, enthusiasts will still believe the creature exists because they want to, evidence be damned. — J.W. J U N E 2 0 2 1 . D IS C OVER

And there are times when even scientists speaking within their area of expertise can muddy the waters. What if a credentialed climate scientist makes claims against the evidence for human-caused global warming? In this case, dissenters can become “lionized,” as Cook puts it. While 97 percent of climate scientists agree there is evidence that humans are at least somewhat responsible for global warming, there is still a very small margin of experts who disagree. And when those dissenters are visible on TV debates and testimonies in Congress, they can take an argument with nearly 100 percent consensus and make it seem like it’s split down the middle. If we’re already primed to listen to these dissenters, that overriding consensus won’t make us change our minds. “If they’re saying the stuff we want to hear, we just psychologically tend to think, ‘Now that person knows what they’re talking about,’ ” Cook says. “And that’s why science deniers rely on these fake experts and these dissenting voices.”

FRINGE IN THE WILD It’s no secret that social media has become a breeding ground for false information. In many cases, online groups can become echo chambers where bias-affirming posts circulate, regardless of whether they’re true or not. Public health expert Sara Gorman doesn’t shy away from the sticky, virtual interactions that these posts might prompt. She dives in headfirst, armed with the knowledge that social media is a primary source of information for a lot of us. Gorman is the CEO of research and education nonprofit Critica, which is conducting a study to see which communication methods work best

when interacting with people who share false health and science information on various social media platforms, including Facebook. Her team started specifically with vaccine misinformation, in response to the deployment of the COVID-19 vaccine. Even before it was rolled out, unfounded claims that production of the vaccines was rushed, or that it will cause serious side effects, permeated social media feeds. Gorman and her team use the Critica Facebook page to target comments or posts that circulate unfounded claims. Rather than simply flagging posts as disinformation and including a link to a fact-check — tactics used by Facebook and other social media platforms — her team engages in a conversation with users. In short, the team predicts that finding common ground with posters will be a more effective strategy, though they’re still in the process of collecting data. Gorman says that opening up a conversation does a

GORMAN SAYS THAT OPENING UP A CONVERSATION DOES A LOT MORE TO FOSTER GOOD COMMUNICATION THAN TRYING TO LECTURE SOMEONE ON WHY THEIR BELIEFS ARE FACTUALLY WRONG. 36

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PRYKHODOV/DREAMSTIME

Social media groups can become echo chambers for false or misleading information.

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lot more to foster good communication than trying to lecture someone on why their beliefs are factually wrong. “You might really talk to someone about, well, all right, we have a common goal. We both want to keep children safe,” she says. “Then you help the person really unpack how they came to their beliefs.” The method works best with people who are on the fence — say they got anti-vaccine information from a friend’s post but didn’t take the time to vet it. Another successful technique draws on the idea of “psychological inoculation.” Much like a vaccine safeguards you against disease, this tactic prepares people to identify the ways that people twist evidence online to make ideas seem scientific, like employing fake experts. “The main reason it works is because people are averse to being misled,” says Cook. Sometimes those kinds of posts are simply mistakes, and a lot of us make them. Research shows people on social media will often share false information without seeing if it checks out first. One study published in 2020 found that people who share stories with false health-related information on Facebook don’t always do so intentionally. In fact, many people share posts with inaccurate information simply because they are distracted — and hit

the repost button based on a short description or headline they agreed with. Gorman says many anti-vaxxers tend to fall into the “on-the-fence” category. However, it would take a lot more to convince someone who is a leader of a fringe group, such as Andrew Wakefield himself, to change their mind. Cook agrees. “It’s incredibly difficult, almost impossible,” he says. “Not only because they’re committed to their ideas, but also it’s how they define themselves. It’s their identity.” That identity can make them feel like they’re fighting for a worthy cause, even as they knowingly distort the facts. But in some situations, when a leader dies or fades away, so do their ideas. After Velikovsky died in 1979, his books and movement sank into obscurity. And like fringe ideas, even a scientific consensus can lose favor. We often only hear about ideas that have stood the test of time and the rigor of repeated testing to gain wide acceptance by mainstream scientists. “Most things published in 2020 in science are going to be wrong in about 10 years. And that’s not a problem,” says Gordin. “That’s how it’s supposed to work.” D

Even scientists can help spread fringe theories. When the small percentage of experts who don’t agree that humans are partially responsible for global warming appear on TV, for example, they can provide fuel for science denial.

Jennifer Walter is an assistant editor at Discover. J U N E 2 02 1 . D IS C OVER

SHOW ME THE

Today’s work with human embryos, including gene-editing and CRISPR, is built on decades of data and peer-reviewed research.

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IENCE

Beneath any valuable study, you’ll find a web of research, institutions, humans — and, of course, money. Trust in science hinges on the process.

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BY ANNA FUNK

ome scientists wish to uncover truths of the natural universe — to learn the properties of distant stars, or deep-sea creatures, or the interior of our cells. Others seek solutions, hoping to better our lives or undo the damage we’ve done to our environment. The list of motivations runs long, depending on who you talk to. But most people don’t know any scientists personally. In 2017, about 4 out of 5 Americans polled couldn’t name a single living scientist, according to Research America. Of those who could, top answers were Stephen Hawking (27 percent), who died in 2018; Neil deGrasse Tyson (19 percent), who last published research in 2008; and Bill Nye (5 percent), who quit his job as an engineer in 1986. Yet 1.5 million-plus Americans are currently working as scientists, which is more than the number of elementary school teachers. We don’t know their names because they’re mostly behind the scenes, trying to resolve questions, bit by bit. Few will ever do work that makes the news. Even fewer will garner enough publicity that people begin to recognize them. Regular Discover readers may know names like astrophysicist Avi Loeb, or Jennifer Doudna, the 2020 Nobel

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NAME THESE LIVING SCIENTISTS

WHEN AMERICANS were asked to name a living scientist in a 2017 poll by Research America, 81 percent failed to deliver. How about you? Here are a few worthy candidates: The COVID-19 pandemic has introduced virologist Anthony Fauci (1) to the masses. American Mathematician Gladys West (2) created key models that run GPS today. Computer scientist Sir Timothy Berners-Lee (3) invented the worldwide web. And biochemist Jennifer Doudna (4) pioneered the gene-editing technology in CRISPR.

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BEHIND THE CURTAIN Carlos Mariscal, a philosopher of science at the University of Nevada, Reno, thinks a big part of science’s public perception problem is poor communication. “We haven’t done a good enough job of bringing people behind the scenes to the process of science, as opposed to the product of science,” says Mariscal. Take nutrition science and eggs. If you just read the headlines, you’d think eggs were a staple food one day, a cholesterol-filled death trap the next, and then back to being a healthy option before you even had a chance to find a new favorite breakfast. If you looked deeper, Mariscal explains, what looked like a flip-flop on the surface was really just scientists doing what they do best: learning. When researchers identified cholesterol’s role in heart disease, and cholesterol’s high levels in eggs, they warned people to be cautious about their egg consumption. Then when they discovered that there are two types of cholesterol and eggs have the healthier kind, eggs went back on the menu. “I think that it’s genuinely one of the most impressive and one of the best features of science,” says Mariscal. “When it goes wrong, it fixes itself. It can correct itself.” Researchers are constantly following up on what current evidence suggests is true, and pushing the boundaries of what’s known. The field is designed to both challenge our current understanding and wade into questions that have no solid answers — at least, not yet. The formal process of science typically begins when a researcher thinks of a specific, testable question and seeks to answer it (typically with a team of experts). The approach goes through multiple reviews, approvals and, often, failed attempts, to secure funding; we’ll tumble down that money hole shortly. The question may get tweaked along the way, and research involving animals

FROM LEFT: TOM WILLIAMS/GETTY; ADRIAN CADIZ/WIKIMEDIA COMMONS; RICK FRIEDMAN/GETTY; ALEXANDER HEINL/GETTY

Prize winner for her work in CRISPR gene-editing. But before we could edit genes with CRISPR, people were accumulating decades of data on microbiology and genetics. Pull any researcher today out of a hat, and we can only speculate how their work might change our lives. Despite their power to improve the world, modern scientists face the realities of polarization and politicization. “Those of us who study science see this as a really unsettling time,” says Allan Brandt, a historian of science at Harvard University. “We’re alarmed at the erosion of scientific legitimacy and authority, because it’s so crucial to solving the world’s problems.” Recent history illuminates how strategic corporate interests and politics can undermine science, beginning on a large scale in the 1950s. That’s when Big Tobacco began sowing seeds of doubt with tactics that many industries still use today. Shortcomings in academia and medicine also have harmed public trust, such as rare incidents of fraud and the many ways that racial, gender and other biases have informed research and public health; those blunders have especially hurt women, people of color, Black and Indigenous communities and LGBTQ+ people. In 2020, fractured trust ruptured into a public health disaster, as scores of Americans revealed that they believed the COVID-19 pandemic was either a hoax or purposefully and drastically exaggerated for political gain — despite constant assertions to the contrary from health officials, doctors and researchers. Listen to scientists and you might hear that climate change could be mitigated, vaccines save lives or genetically engineered crops can help combat starvation without adverse health effects. Why should we believe them? The answer can only come from an examination of the process of science itself, which unfolds along a web of funding, research standards and public perceptions.

“WE’RE ALARMED AT THE EROSION OF SCIENTIFIC LEGITIMACY AND AUTHORITY, BECAUSE IT’S SO CRUCIAL TO SOLVING THE WORLD’S PROBLEMS.” — ALLAN BRANDT, HISTORIAN OF SCIENCE,

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HARVARD UNIVERSITY

or humans is subject to an additional review board and committee. If money is secured, the lab or fieldwork begins and the team documents their findings. When it’s time to share them with the world, they write a research paper and select a scientific journal that might publish it. Options include many smaller, subject-matter-specific journals and some bigger names, such as Science or Nature. That’s when the crucial peer-review phase kicks in. After submission to a specific journal, the main editor will give a paper first look. If it seems to be a good fit, that editor will identify typically three other scientists in the relevant field of research (the eponymous peers in the process) and ask them to review the paper. That means multiple experts examine the work ultra-carefully, looking for anything that seems amiss. They may say: I think this datapoint is a glitch; you used the wrong analysis here; or, your results are fine, but the conclusions you drew are flawed. Any given paper goes through at least one round of edits between the authors and the reviewers

— typically more — until everyone involved agrees that the paper is sound. This thorough vetting and scrutiny is the reason peer-reviewed journals form the bedrock of solid science.

PAPER TRAIL Money, too, is embedded in this foundation, a reality that can draw criticism and scrutiny. If you want research, you need funding. So, who’s forking it over? Simply put, research and development (R&D) is funded by numerous businesses, organizations and government bodies. While nailing down the figures gets sticky — and it depends on how you define science research — $580 billion was invested in R&D in the U.S. in 2018, according to the National Center for Science and Engineering Statistics. Barring more than half of that spent on experimental development (which includes a lot of private R&D — such as an auto company improving their car engines — that never lands in journals or public view),

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A SKEPTIC’S GUIDE TO

READING SCIENCE

WITH SO MUCH information drifting around us, it can be hard to tell what’s real and

what’s bunk. When it comes to scientific research, here are six questions that can help you decide when to trust a study’s claims, and when to remain skeptical.

Is this info peer-reviewed? All papers are not created equal, even if they run in a bona fide journal. Sometimes you can find preprint papers that haven’t been fully vetted. Letters from experts or editors also appear in journals. Examine the language at the top and bottom of papers to understand what you’re looking at.

Who did the study? On any scientific paper, you’ll find a list of authors and their institutional affiliation. Look for trusted universities and institutes. Take note if the researchers work for a for-profit industry or a nonprofit with a policy agenda. This information is typically right underneath the author names at the top of a paper, sometimes hidden in a drop-down menu. If it’s not there, it might be tucked at the end of the paper somewhere.

What were the parameters? Consider whether test subjects in studies were animals or humans. Sample size is also a critical component. If you want to know if a new drug is safe, would you be satisfied with results on just one person? Or 100 mice? Or 100,000 people? Although different types of studies require differing sample sizes to get satisfactory results, trust your gut when a number seems low. Look at the methods section of a paper to see sample size. It’s often explicitly stated with the letter n (as in “n = 100”).

Do the results support the conclusions? There are a lot of reasons why researchers occasionally write a paper where the results don’t exactly support the written conclusions, and they’re not all malicious. But this is a key distinction that can separate good studies from bad. Be wary of conclusions and claims that exaggerate the actual findings or go beyond the scope of the data collected in the study. This one requires some expertise or practice, as well as a thorough look through the whole paper.

Do other studies agree? Finally, any single study is just that — one study, typically in a vast field of similar work. Before a research finding starts to be accepted as a possible fact, countless other studies need to confirm it and try to disprove it. Although you might be able to find a few studies that claim carbon emissions from humans don’t cause climate change, that wouldn’t negate the thousands of others that show the opposite. Whenever deciding what to believe, look at as many studies as possible. What does the larger body of evidence, as a whole, suggest? The best shortcut to this is to find a review paper or what’s called a meta-analysis. These are papers written by experts that summarize numerous studies and all the findings on a subject to date. — A.F. SNOWINGG/DREAMSTIME

Who funded the study? Research rarely gets published anymore without

a disclosure about research funds. Look for federal agencies like the National Science Foundation or the National Institutes of Health. Notice if the funding came from a for-profit industry or a nonprofit with a policy agenda. Look for a funding disclosure and conflict of interest statement near the acknowledgement section at the end of the paper.

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Scientific knowledge has been a tool for progress in both the public and private sectors. In the U.S., those two worlds often overlap.

Historical Trend in Federal vs. Business Funding of Science R&D in the U.S. 80% 70%

roughly $211.5 billion went toward basic and applied science research. From that total, businesses contributed about 43 percent of the funds. The rest came from federal money (38 percent) plus state governments, nonprofits and other institutions. The bulk of federal science funding gets dispersed as grants to universities and institutions through the National Science Foundation (NSF), the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and other agencies. At an agency like the NSF, a panel made up of external people — experts in the relevant fields — reviews each proposal and makes a recommendation for which projects get funding. Typically, the granting body isn’t involved with the research once it begins. Scientists remain independent to do their work, but share a few progress reports to the funding institution along the way. “People think that if someone is funding something then they’re basically buying that research, and the people doing the research, and that’s not quite the case,” says

50% 40% 30% 20% 10%

Federal

Business

19 53 19 58 19 63 19 68 19 73 19 78 19 83 19 88 19 93 19 98 20 03 20 08 20 13 20 18

FROM TOP: JULIA NIMKE/LINDAU NOBEL LAUREATE MEETINGS; JAY SMITH

60%

Source: Congressional Research Service/congress.gov

Antoinette Serrato, a climatologist at the University of Nevada, Reno. Things can, however, get a bit complicated when forprofit industries invest considerable money into research, according to Mariscal. “Definitely in the majority of cases, the funding has little to no noticeable effect,” he says. “[But] you have these really malicious uses of funding,

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TOBACCO INDUSTRY PLAYBOOK Even when funding sources aren’t directly participating in the research process, they do have one ability that gives them power: choosing what to fund. This was a core strategy of the tobacco industry’s disinformation campaign that lasted for half of the last century. They funded scientists to study other causes of cancer besides tobacco, and more. “It’s a pretty dramatic story,” says Brandt, the science historian. Top tobacco company executives gathered at New York’s Plaza Hotel in December of 1953. It was a crisis moment for them, with major findings beginning to connect the dots between smoking and lung cancer. So, they called in a public relations expert, John Hill, the head of one of the biggest PR firms at the time.

WHO’S PAYING SCIENTISTS? IN 2018, $580 billion was spent on science research and development (R&D) in the U.S., compared to $548 million in 2017. The total includes the categories of experimental development and basic and applied research. The vast majority of development funding (85 percent, or $314 billion in 2018) came from businesses. Much of that work is proprietary for products, goods and processes. A total of $211.5 billion went toward basic and applied research. From that total, businesses contributed about 43 percent; federal money funded 38 percent; and state governments, nonprofits and higher education institutions invested 19 percent.

U.S. R&D Funding by Source and Category, 2018 Total R&D

Basic Research

Federal

Business

Applied Research

Universities

Source: Congressional Research Service/congress.gov

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Development

Other

“Hill [basically] said to them, ‘Don’t try to dispute this. Don’t ignore it. If you don’t like the science that’s coming out, produce your own science.’ And so the industry set up an industry research program,” Brandt says. The strategy has come to be known as the “tobacco industry playbook.” Others, like the oil and beverage industries, have followed suit. The main goal? Fund as much research as possible that distracts from your harmful product, as well as any research that might demonstrate your product is safe. That way, you can point to the other research and say that the link between the product and the harm is not clear. In 1981, just a few years after Exxon scientists found a convincing link between fossil fuels and climate change, company executive Roger Cohen wrote an internal memo warning that the continued consumption of fossil fuels could be catastrophic, “at least for a substantial fraction of the population.” Yet external communications from the company maintained a different message. Even years later, then-chief executive Lee Raymond said in a 1996 speech at the Detroit Economic Club: “Currently, the scientific evidence is inconclusive as to whether human activities are having a significant effect on the global climate.” Today, this type of messaging is still the bread and butter of oil and other lobbyists, and can be repeated by U.S. politicians and PR consultants alike. In some instances, campaigns have realized that simply saying “the evidence is inconclusive” is enough to achieve their goals — without actually funding or presenting research.

RESPONSIBLE RESEARCH These tactics can complicate the playing field when it comes to individual pieces of research. But the long-term trajectory of science has ways of sifting out and correcting work that is infected by ulterior motives or human error. There are ways to identify corporate interests, especially in modern work. Most scientific journals require authors to disclose any conflicts of interest and their funding sources before publishing results; anyone reading scientific findings can look for this disclaimer, usually at the bottom of a paper, before the works cited. And although it may seem that researchers are incentivized to falsify their work, the incentives to not conduct research fraud can be much stronger. Researchers caught conducting unethical research can lose their jobs and be blacklisted from the field. In 2005, a professor in the Department of Medicine at the University of Vermont was the first American researcher to go to jail for falsifying data — and he was not the last. Since 2009, the NSF — through federal law — requires that all institutes that receive NSF funding mandate Responsible Conduct of Research training for their researchers. It’s like driver’s ed or sex ed, but for scientists, complete with dramatized videos depicting the consequences of unethical practices. Sometimes, scientists do make an honest mistake that

JAY SMITH

as with the tobacco industry, that went out of their way to fund lots of research,” he says. For instance, the tobacco industry invested in research about the genetic factors of lung disease. They also built legal cases around asbestos to fend off plaintiffs who smoked and got cancer. None of that means the research itself was conducted improperly, even if the motivation for and use of the research was shady. “They just wanted to muddy up the waters,” Mariscal says. Essentially, research could be used like a shield to protect tobacco sales.

ONE BUSINESS STRATEGY HAS COME TO BE KNOWN AS THE “TOBACCO INDUSTRY PLAYBOOK.” THE MAIN GOAL? FUND AS MUCH RESEARCH AS

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POSSIBLE THAT DISTRACTS FROM YOUR HARMFUL PRODUCT.

slips through — like misidentifying an insect specimen, failing to notice the cat walked across the keyboard and changed a number, or choosing the wrong model to analyze their data. If a researcher down the line notices the error, the paper can be retracted — essentially, unpublished. Or future studies can show why something was wrong, and the earlier paper becomes obsolete, even if it’s still published. This is one reason why research is an ongoing, cumulative process: One bad study won’t typically cause significant harm. “There are some times where there’s stuff that gets done that gets overturned. But that’s fine, it’s what we expect,” says Mariscal. Ultimately, the whole process is designed to ensure that science unfolds ethically and accurately. But science also doesn’t happen in a vacuum. The impact it has on the world rests not only on human scientists, but on the interplay between policymakers, media and society. Communicating findings through this tangle of opinions and channels complicates matters drastically.

Journalists at Discover and other publications play a role in this chain, poring over science journals, parsing compelling findings and talking to the researchers. Distilling all the info, and discerning what the public needs and wants to know, is more art than science. Some days, the news is “Study Says Eggs Are Back on the Menu.” Other days, science communication is explaining the arrival and approval of a vaccine created in record time — and poised to save countless lives around the globe. “Academia and industry and government can produce effective, excellent science for human good,” Brandt says, pointing out humanity’s current hope against COVID-19. In that sense, the same global pandemic that has fueled rampant misinformation — and revealed the extent of some people’s distrust — also offers a striking example of science and its process working properly. D Anna Funk is an ecologist and science writer based in Kansas City, Missouri.

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Humans deceive — and so do animals. Here’s why we fall for trickery, and what happens when lies go unchecked.

NATURALBORN LIARS BY AJA RADEN ILLUSTRATIONS BY JAY SMITH

e tend to assume that deliberately telling lies is some sort of pernicious aberration unique to liars. Perhaps it’s the result of a mental defect or, more likely, some sort of moral failing. It is not — everything living lies, including you. Before you dismiss the thought, consider this: Human deception and evasion are no different than the animal equivalent of camouflage, spots and stripes. Charm is our very own version of frilly fins and peacock feathers. And the effort to deceive is an evolutionary arms race as old as organic life.

Take the blue morpho butterfly, for example; it’s the one with beautiful, iridescent, sky-blue wings. First lie: That dazzling blue color isn’t actually there. It’s just an optical illusion, created by blue light selectively reflected off of millions of mirrorlike, microscopic gray scales. The reverse side of their wings have no scales and are a dark, dull brown. That vivid blue only exists in your mind — or your eyes, depending on how you see it. But real or reflected, the colors actually help them to hide in plain sight, just not via camouflage. Rather, the butterflies do their best hiding in midair, where they should be at their most vulnerable. As they fly, blue morphos flaps their wings rapidly back and forth between visible dark brown and difficult-to-see, reflected sky blue. The effect makes them seem — through a perceptual glitch — to appear and disappear. This strange game of hide-and-seek is called a flashing defense, and it has nothing to do with blending in. Rather, it exploits the inability of many species, particularly birds, to keep their eyes fixed on a moving object that doesn’t move in a continuous line. From caterpillars to con artists, everything living lies. The capacity for deceit is an important asset, honed over millions

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of generations, and it is an essential part of communication — one with sometimes deadly consequences.

THE BIG LIE In the evolution of deceit, language only came about quite recently, billions of years after more basic tools of the con. There’s even some debate that humans may have developed language specifically to manipulate each other in newer and cleverer ways. It’s just the latest innovation in a billionyear-old chess game. As Robert Trivers, professor of anthropology and biological sciences at Rutgers University, puts it: “Our most prized possession — language — not only strengthens our ability to lie, but greatly extends its range.” Consider: When you lie with your scent, your pattern or your petals, you can only lie about what you are, and you can only lie about the here and now. Lie with words, and you can lie about anything, anyone, anywhere; you can rewrite facts past, present, and future. Human speech allows deceptions to transcend space and time. Take, for example, the intricate con carried out by Gregor MacGregor, a charming heir to a noble family from Scotland in the 18th century. Like many noble

fauna. The riverbeds were lined with big chunks of gold, and numerous other natural resources, including precious gems, all there for the taking. MacGregor even brought a local back from Poyais, whom he declared an ambassador, as well as a copy of the Poyaisian constitution and the very land grant and proclamation making him cazique of Poyais. He claimed the natives were friendly, that the cities were brimming with culture, and that the land was ripe for development and a Christian colonial ruler — a proposition that was particularly appealing in his native Scotland, as the country had no colonies of its own. Does this sound too good to be true? Well, yes, clearly. The whole idea of Poyais being conveniently perfect in every regard and that anyone believed that for a second, sounds foolish — now.

THE PROBLEM WITH PERCEPTION

families at the time, the MacGregors had seen better days. So Gregor joined the military to seek fortune and glory. Mostly fortune. In October 1822, after over a decade of fighting and traveling through the jungles of South America, MacGregor returned to England. But he didn’t come home as a mere soldier or decorated war hero; he returned to London as Gregor I, prince of the Caribbean nation of Poyais. Immediately, MacGregor began a widespread media campaign to educate the public about Poyais. He published articles about Poyais in respected journals, describing the land’s unspoiled beauty and excessive natural resources. The prose was accompanied by detailed illustrations, which he claimed he’d brought back from the country itself. These pictures showed a land slightly larger than Wales, full of clean, fresh water and fertile soil for cultivation. There were forests full of trees and game and exotic flora and

The default setting in humans is to accept the reality that has been presented to us, so much so that a little kink in our thinking called honesty bias constitutes one of 12 basic cognitive biases that circumscribe rational thought. These are systematic errors in cognition that occur in processing and deciphering information we glean from the world around us. They’re not mistakes or logical fallacies; they’re hardwired limitations in our thought process. Honesty bias is a sort of mental shortcut our brains take where we accept anything we’re presented with as true, if there are no obvious contradictions. For example, if you ask someone the time and they look at their watch and tell you it’s 3 p.m., you will believe them. You don’t reflexively question whether they’re lying to you or whether their watch is wrong — unless, of course, it’s too dark out to be 3:00 or you have reason to suspect that the person wants you to be late. Though cognitive biases tend to skew our judgment badly in some situations, they exist for a reason. Social psychologists believe they help us process information more efficiently. Honesty bias may leave you open to being deceived, but, by the numbers, the vast majority of information you’re presented with is true. Not having to reason out every bit of data you encounter is a valuable neurological ability, a shortcut that allows us to function and learn. Consider: If someone told you that there was a commercial rocket launch this year, taking a shuttle full of paying customers to the moon, would you believe them? You probably would; people believe in the reality that they’re presented with, and this is ours. Many of us have lived our whole lives in a post moon-landing era, where stories about rocket launches and companies like SpaceX dominate headlines.

THE DEFAULT SETTING IN HUMANS IS TO ACCEPT THE REALITY THAT HAS BEEN PRESENTED TO US, SO MUCH SO THAT A LITTLE KINK IN OUR THINKING CALLED HONESTY BIAS CONSTITUTES ONE OF THE 12 BASIC COGNITIVE BIASES.

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Even if Poyais still sounds too good to be true, so did the rest of the New World in the 18th and 19th century. MacGregor lived in the era of empire building via seized foreign territories, country-sized land claims based on very little, and unimaginable stolen riches. India was real, with its gleaming golden palaces and massive gemstones. The Near East was real, with its vast oceans of sand and ancient stone cities. Australia was real, with its bizarre, exotic flora and fauna. Why not Poyais?

MIND GAMES

There are a lot of funny quirks in our minds that explain, both neurologically and psychologically, why this sort of cascading failure of basic reason would occur. First and foremost, there’s that pesky honesty bias. Authority bias is also often at work. This mechanism compels us to trust and believe those who seem to have more power or influence (includAdapted from The Truth ing mere social stature) than we do. About Lies: The Illusion Essentially, we’re wired to believe and of Honesty and the trust our so-called betters. SETTING SAIL Evolution of Deceit by For instance, you’re more likely to MacGregor succeeded in getting seven Aja Raden. Copyright © believe a doctor who tells you you’re 2021 by the author and massive ships’ worth of colonists to sick than a friend who tells you the reprinted by permission leave their homes and embark on a same. This makes sense: We default to of St. Martin’s Press. journey to the New World, having generally trusting and believing people spent or exchanged everything they we deem to be authority figures. had to start a new life in His Highness But what’s really interesting is that Gregor I’s now famous paradise. In you’d also be more likely to believe September 1822 and January 1823, the the doctor than your friend if they first two ships, the Honduras Packet and the Kennersley were to tell you how to program the computer in your car, Castle, embarked for Poyais carrying hundreds of paseven if you knew that they knew nothing about it. The sengers, as still more ships back in England were filling same holds true for politicians and so-called “experts” of with people and preparing to set sail. any kind — even celebrities. We unconsciously assume But when the Honduras Packet reached land, the that they’re better informed than we are, and we are more colonists had no idea where they were — except that it inclined to take what they say on faith. It’s why celebrity was definitely not what MacGregor had described. They product endorsements are so valuable to companies: assumed they had landed in the wrong location, as they You’re hardwired to trust that a famous actress really does found no ready-made cities, no valuable resources, no know which fruit juice will prevent aging or that your farmable land, not even edible food. And there were no favorite musician really does have the inside track on friendly natives to meet them. which charities are legitimate. In fact, there were no signs of any other inhabitants We don’t believe them based on substantial reasoning; at all. Even the climate was a lie. The section of coast we believe them because our brain has taken a shortcut. where they landed (in modern-day Honduras) was a hot, And, like honesty bias, authority bias benefits us, individuswampy, mosquito-infested jungle so uninhabitable that ally and as a cooperative group — we don’t need to know it remains largely undeveloped to this day. everything about our math teacher to trust them when They did their best to build shelters out of sticks and they show us long division. mud and to find fresh water, but a majority of the stranded But it’s also an open loophole in our thought process settlers died from starvation, exposure and tropical diseases that can backfire, or be deliberately taken advantage of by like yellow fever and malaria on the isolated, dangerous bad actors. The fact that the aristocratic class of England and mostly deserted Mosquito Coast. It wasn’t until a small and Scotland fell for the con of the self-proclaimed prince group of survivors — all that was left — was rescued by a of Poyais isn’t confusing or absurd. It’s predictable, and it’s British ship from a nearby colony in Belize and taken back evidence that their brains were functioning normally. D to London that the disaster was exposed. Aja Raden is a New York Times bestselling author. Her expertise MacGregor had not merely oversold Poyais’s virtues or sits at the intersection of academic history, industry experience exaggerated his ownership or authority in the matter; he’d and scientific perspective. made up the entire country. Poyais never existed at all.

INDIA WAS REAL, WITH ITS GOLDEN PALACES AND MASSIVE GEMSTONES. THE NEAR EAST WAS REAL, WITH ITS VAST OCEANS OF SAND AND ANCIENT STONE CITIES. AUSTRALIA WAS REAL, WITH ITS BIZARRE FLORA AND FAUNA. WHY NOT POYAIS?

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HE’S SPENT YEARS RESEARCHING MISINFORMATION. NOW THIS PSYCHOLOGIST MAKES ONLINE GAMES TO VACCINATE THE PUBLIC AGAINST FAKE NEWS.

BY ALEX ORLANDO

last November found that 21 percent of U.S. adults don’t plan on getting vaccinated, and remain “pretty certain” that more information won’t change their mind. It’s troubling to think that simply debunking these claims — essentially, exposing them as untrue — is not enough to shift some people’s perceptions. But what if there was a way to prime people to spot disinformation before they see it? In other words, what if there was a way to create a sort of vaccine for fake news? That’s the hope of Sander van der Linden, a social psychologist at the University of Cambridge. While much of his research revolves around human judgment and decision-making, in recent years he’s turned his attention to the problem of fake news. It’s no secret that information has the potential to spread like a virus online, and disinformation — incorrect information that’s circulated on purpose — is particularly virulent. After learning that fake news peddlers employ many of the same persuasive tactics over and over, Van der Linden set out to “inoculate” people by showing them how these strategies work. Or as he puts it: “Once

Van der Linden helped create three online games to teach players about the tactics behind misinformation: Bad News, Go Viral! and Harmony Square.

D IS C O V E R M A G A Z I N E .C O M

How did you first become interested in misinformation and fighting the spread of fake news?

A: Initially, the interest in my specialty of influence and persuasion came from the fact that, like many social psychologists, I was interested in propaganda and how that works, particularly following events like

you know what goes into the sausage, you probably don’t want to eat it.” Instead of a physical shot, his delivery method of choice is online games. In 2018, Van der Linden and his colleagues launched Bad News, in which players assume the mantle of a fake news tycoon. They’re tasked with impersonating public figures, stoking fear and discrediting opponents to amass as many social media followers as possible. Similarly, in Go Viral!, another project that came out in 2020 from the Cambridge researchers, players use fearmongering and emotionally charged language about the pandemic to make messages go viral on a simulated social media network. Van der Linden’s latest game, Harmony Square, made in partnership with the U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Agency, tasks the player with using disinformation to pit residents of a small, quiet neighborhood against each other. Discover recently caught up with Van der Linden to learn more about how false information spreads, why inoculating people against misinformation works and how, exactly, that sausage gets made.

World War II and other human atrocities that are happening around the world where people become persuaded of very dangerous ideas. That process of how people are influenced by information — and then act on it in a way that’s detrimental to others — was really my larger driver for studying this. In 2015, before the U.S. election, my colleagues and I were studying disinformation

PREVIOUS SPREAD: DANIELLE DA SILVA PHOTOGRAPHY. LEFT: DROG/GUSMANSON (3)

COVID-19 isn’t the only thing that spread like wildfire in 2020 — so did the conspiracy theories about it. Misleading claims that the virus was a political hoax or that the vaccines harbor microchips to allow the government to surveil its citizens blazed across social media. By December, Facebook, Twitter and YouTube had banned COVID-19 vaccine misinformation on their platforms. But this flare-up of falsehoods wasn’t just harmless noise. A survey by the Pew Research Center

about climate change, specifically. We started to figure out that there are a lot of commonalities in the techniques that are being used to deceive people on the issue of climate change. There are a lot of specific myths and hoaxes and conspiracies out there, but they all use these recurring techniques. The logical next question for us was: How could we inoculate people against that? We wanted to preexpose people to weakened doses of these manipulation techniques that are used in misinformation to see if that strengthens their intellectual antibodies against it.

Where did the idea come from that you could create a psychological vaccine against misinformation? A: There’s this guy called Bill McGuire, who in the early ’50s and ’60s was studying at Yale University. It was just after the war and they were interested in how propaganda works. They kind of informally termed this a “vaccine” against brainwash. Although they never tested it on misinformation, they did some early experiments that asked, “What if you could vaccinate people against persuasive attacks by administering a weakened dose of it?” And they had some very compelling, early data on this. It’s so relevant now — it seems like the ultimate metaphor. I found it so surprising that people had completely forgotten about this. And that’s why I reintroduced the metaphor and started expanding on it. Because what’s interesting is that at the time there was no internet; they weren’t thinking about how to actually do this in the real world.

Q VOLODYMYR NIKITENKO/SHUTTERSTOCK

What made you think that an online game could be the best way to deliver this vaccine? A: This really happened in my conversations with Jon Roozenbeek. He was a student at Cambridge studying Russian media propaganda; he was really interested in what we were doing. One of the things that emerged from my chats with John was the idea that we wanted to scale it up. We wanted to vaccinate people against the

underlying techniques and not specific misinformation. And we also thought that would generate less reaction from people. It’s one thing for a scientist to tell people climate change is real, but people who don’t believe in climate change don’t really want to hear that. We needed another way.

Tell me more about the misinformation tactics that you and your colleagues learned about when you studied fake news. What techniques will players arm themselves with when they play Bad News?

A: We started to have the goal of mapping out the techniques that underpin most fake news and misinformation. That took us about a year to read up and really try to distill all of the key techniques. We landed on a few, including polarizing people, conspiracy theories, impersonation, trolling other people, discrediting — like saying, “You’re fake news.” So we distilled it. The first thing you do in the game is impersonate Donald Trump and declare war on North Korea over Twitter. That’s really meant to illustrate the impersonation technique more broadly. What’s interesting is that we found most people actually

miss this at the beginning — because Trump’s Twitter handle is manipulated so it’s an N instead of an M. But even though it’s all fictional in the game, it’s based on real-world events. And this one was really based on a story from Warren Buffett’s account. Somebody started a fake account impersonating Warren Buffett with one T instead of two Ts. They started out doing all sorts of nonsense. The account garnered hundreds of thousands of followers in a very short amount of time, so it’s very influential. That’s what we try to inoculate people against in the first level. The other big one is polarization.

That’s probably the most difficult one for people because everyone has some preference on politics. But what we try to do explicitly in the game is tell people that it doesn’t really matter what side you’re on — it’s about driving two sides apart. That’s really the strategy. So whenever you feel riled up about an issue, try to reflect on the fact that some people are just trying to stir things up.

You published several studies about the effectiveness of Bad News after its release. Did any of your findings surprise you? J U N E 2 0 2 1 . D IS C OV ER

it for people. It’s like a magic trick where we’re trying to show people how the trick works so they’re not duped by it again. Very few people want to go out and become a magician.

Van der Linden speaks at the 2019 Hay Festival in Wales about his game Bad News.

In your 2020 study on the long-term effectiveness of inoculating against misinformation, you end by paraphrasing Professor Severus Snape from the Harry Potter series: “Your defenses must be as flexible and inventive as the arts you seek to undo.” Why does that resonate with you?

D I S C O V E R M A G A Z I N E .C O M

immune response. And prompting them to memorize what they’ve learned. That’s something that we’re currently investigating further, because there are different ways of delivering booster shots.

Are you worried these games might create a new crop of fake news peddlers and conspiracy theorists by showing people how misinformation works?

A: It’s probably the question we get asked most: Are you worried about teaching people how to spread fake news? We’ve approached this quite deliberately. There are two motives for why people spread fake news intentionally — one’s financial and one’s political. So one thing we don’t do in the games is we don’t show people how to make money off of fake news. And the games are very nonpolitical.

MISINFORMATION IS EVOLVING; IF YOU THINK OF IT AS A VIRUS, IT HAS NEW STRAINS. IT’S GETTING MORE COMPLEX, IT’S GETTING NEW FEATURES AND IT’S BECOMING SMARTER. We allow people to make fun of things across the political spectrum and pick sides. Even if 1 out of a million people gets the idea, if it vaccinates 900,000 people, the benefits probably largely outweigh the risks. We don’t think it’s a substantial risk in the sense that we’re not teaching people anything new; this stuff is already out there. We’re just exposing

it fun and entertaining and scalable. And we need to be flexible and inventive in that it needs to be real-time; we need to be able to adjust our interventions. Because only then can we try to undo some of the ways in which the dark arts of persuasion and manipulation are quickly evolving. D Alex Orlando is an associate editor at Discover.

IGA KONCKE/HAY FESTIVAL

A: It went in different stages, as anything with this sort of new intervention does. The first study we did, we had about 10,000 people who opted into the game that is still live; we run new experiments all the time as we get responses on a daily basis from people playing the game. What we found is that people were able to spot fake news better after playing, so they thought fake news was less reliable. One of the biggest questions we got was how long the psychological effects last. It’s unlike a biological vaccine, where in some cases, after a few shots you have lifelong immunity. We didn’t expect that to work in that same way. We started following up with people week after week and launching misinformation attacks on them to see how they’re doing after they played the game. After the initial treatment, they’ll get notifications for follow-up surveys in which they are only confronted with a list of fake Twitter posts and asked to rate how reliable or accurate they find them — and how likely they would be to share them. So it’s a simulated social media feed, not a real one. “Misinformation attack” sounds a bit nefarious but what we mean is just that people are confronted with misinformation. What we found in the first study was that the vaccination effect was still there after two months with these follow-ups. But, in one of the conditions, we found that if we didn’t follow up with people, the effect was still positive, but it decayed, significantly. So we started hypothesizing that maybe when we’re following up with people we’re actually boosting their

A: The idea is that misinformation is evolving; if you think of it as a virus, it has new strains. Whereas impersonation was simple at the beginning, now we have deepfakes. It’s getting more complex, it’s getting new features and it’s becoming smarter. The counterstrategies — the fact-checking and the debunking — haven’t been doing the same thing. It’s very static and there’s been no advancement. The reason I started using that phrase is because it just hit me and I realized that if we want to fight the Dark Arts, we need to make our own solutions as flexible and inventive as what they’re doing. Because what they’re doing is evolving and getting more specific and using big data and getting more sophisticated. And we’re not. Specifically, in terms of the games, when Snape says “flexible and inventive,” it really resonated with me that we need to go beyond science. We need to make

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HISTORY LESSONS BY STEPHANIE DEMARCO

In recent years, conservation scientists have taken advantage of non-invasive imaging and high-energy X-rays produced by particle accelerators to understand just why these beautiful yellows have morphed into dark browns and sallow whites. Their findings are improving how museums store and display these delicate works of art, preserving the bright yellows of the past before they disappear.

CENTURIES AGO, THE DISCOVERY OF TWO ELEMENTS LED TO NEW — BUT UNSTABLE — YELLOW PIGMENTS. TODAY, SCIENTISTS ARE DEPLOYING PARTICLE ACCELERATORS TO SAVE ARTWORK IN THESE SHADES.

f not for some mysterious Siberian lead or a contaminated vial of medicine, Vincent van Gogh’s Sunflowers might not exist, and the figure in Edvard Munch’s The Scream would have looked downright calm. The discovery of two new elements — chromium and cadmium — at the turn of the 19th century led to a wealth of new yellow pigments. But in their excitement for the fresh, bold shades, painters didn’t realize that the colors might not last.

D IS C O V E R M A G A Z I N E .C O M

NEW ELEMENTS FOR PAINTING As the 18th century drew to a close, French chemist Louis Nicolas Vauquelin was puzzling over a piece of red lead ore from Siberia. He and his colleagues could not agree on its chemical makeup. Was it a mixture of arsenic and sulfur, or maybe lead, iron and clay? Determined to set the record straight, Vauquelin performed a series of experiments to test how the mysterious substance reacted under different conditions: Acid obtained from the lead was heated in a charcoal oven, boiled in muriatic acid, and even left out in the sun. After boiling the ore in a solution of potassium carbonate, Vauquelin found

WIKIMEDIA COMMONS (2)

Fading Sunflowers and Screams

Vincent van Gogh’s Sunflowers series makes use of Chrome Yellow pigments, while Edvard Munch’s The Scream employs Cadmium Yellow.

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A tale of two chemists: French Louis Nicolas Vauquelin (left) discovered chromium, while German Friedrich Stromeyer discovered cadmium.

Claude Monet noted that the Chrome Yellow pigment on some of his paintings “has greatly faded.” And Renoir complained that he “used to use chrome yellow which is a superb colour, but which apparently plays nasty tricks.” Cadmium Yellow, it seemed, was the perfect solution to the problem. It was intense, bright, and praised by pigment manufacturers as a color “which may be used with perfect certainty.” But a few decades after many artists had happily switched to Cadmium Yellow, the English painter William Holman Hunt expressed some doubts: “Cadmium indeed at the best is very capricious,” he wrote in 1906. “Some specimens painted on a trial canvas in 1860, had in 1880 sunk to the colour of dirty beeswax.” About 100 years later, his worries proved right.

LET THERE BE LIGHT

Renoir complained that he “used to use chrome yellow, which is a superb colour, but which apparently plays nasty tricks.”

To understand how these pigments change, scientists ping them with light. “Thanks to the use of different kinds of light, you can get information of different natures related to the elemental and molecular composition of the pigments,” says Letizia Monico, a heritage scientist at the Italian National Research Council. To identify a yellow brushstroke as Chrome Yellow or Cadmium Yellow, for example, scientists shine high-energy X-rays onto it using a technique called X-ray fluorescence. The X-rays excite the electrons in the elements that make up the pigment, causing them to leap to higher energy levels. Because staying at these levels is unstable, the electrons will fall back down and release energy in the form of light. The light that’s released is specific to each element, so by observing it, scientists can identify whether a cadmium or a chromium element is present. But just determining if a certain element is there doesn’t tell scientists if the pigment has degraded or not. To do that, scientists use X-rays in a technique called X-ray absorption near-edge structure spectroscopy (or XANES), determining the chemical state of one element at a time. “Quite often, the elemental composition itself is stable,” says Marine Cotte, a beamline scientist at the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility (ESRF) in Grenoble, France. “However, if you can have information about what is the chemistry of this

WIKIMEDIA COMMONS (2)

that a solid compound formed in a yellow-colored acid. The solid was lead carbonate — confirming that the red lead ore did in fact contain lead. But what about the yellow liquid? In all of his tests, the properties of the ore hadn’t matched any other known element. Thus, Vauquelin reasoned, the yellow solution must contain a brand-new element. When he mixed the yellow liquid with different elements, it changed into bright colors with each one. So Vauquelin named the new element chromium, based on the Greek word chrōma, meaning “color.” Unsurprisingly, this intensely colored new element led to an explosion of new yellow paints. “Barium chromate, strontium chromate, zinc potassium chromate, [and] lead chromates of different hues gave you a whole range,” says Francesca Casadio, an associate vice president and the executive director of conservation and science at the Art Institute of Chicago. “It really gave artists all these options.” To turn these chemical compounds into a usable paint, pigment manufacturers ground them down into microscopic particles, which they then mixed into a binder to make the pigment spreadable; in the 18th and 19th centuries, this was usually an oil like linseed oil. Chrome Yellow, the pigment made from lead chromate, was a particular favorite of the Impressionists and Post-Impressionists like PierreAuguste Renoir and Camille Pissarro. Van Gogh, too, bathed the flowers of his Sunflowers series in it. Meanwhile, in the autumn of 1817, as artists began brushing Chrome Yellow onto their canvases, the apothecaries of Hildesheim were realizing they had a problem. When they tested the purity of their supply of zinc carbonate, instead of forming a white powder as expected, it turned bright yellow. The local apothecary inspector for the small German town, chemist Friedrich Stromeyer, discovered that the contaminant was not one of the common impurities in zinc ore, but a completely new element — cadmium. Stromeyer remarked on its bright yellow hue and noted that it “promises to be useful in painting.” By the 1840s, Cadmium Yellow, the pigment made of cadmium sulfide, was in artists’ hands. Even as Cadmium Yellow gained popularity, Chrome Yellow was not living up to artists’ expectations. What began as a vibrant yellow could quickly turn a dark, mottled brown after exposure to light.

specific metal, then you can have an idea about the degradation.” Because degraded pigment is often located in a very small section of a painting, scientists need a narrow beam of X-rays to focus on it. To do this, scientists use X-rays produced by synchrotrons, a type of circular particle accelerator. The two facilities involved in the research, ESRF and the Deutsches Elektronen-Synchrotron in Hamburg, Germany, boast circumferences of 880 and 2,400 feet, respectively; as the electrons zoom around the giant loop at close to the speed of light, they emit X-rays that can be focused into a beam to probe pigment particles at a micrometer or even nanometer scale. In 2015, using these techniques, Monico, Cotte, and their colleagues uncovered the chemistry behind Chrome Yellow’s color change in Van Gogh’s Sunflowers series: Light was causing the chromium (VI) ions in the lead chromate pigment to reduce to chromium (III) ions, resulting in dark brown compounds where the yellow ones used to be.

LILIYA VANTSURA/DREAMSTIME

ILLUMINATING THE CULPRIT The cause of Cadmium Yellow’s fading, however, was not clear. Studies of Henri Matisse’s painting The Joy of Life and Van Gogh’s Flowers in a Blue Vase led scientists to hypothesize that Cadmium Yellow might be degrading into pale-white compounds due mainly to humidity exposure. In 2020, Monico and her team performed a series of tests on Munch’s The Scream to understand what caused his Cadmium Yellow to fade. They shined different energies of light over the surface of The Scream and pinged a tiny flake of paint from the painting with X-rays from a synchrotron to assess the current degradation state of the Cadmium Yellow pigment. By comparing the current state of The Scream with artificially aged Cadmium Yellow paint exposed to light, high humidity, and high-heat conditions, the team discovered why the brilliant yellow pigment had faded. “It’s not light,” Monico says, “but humidity, the main factor that could have induced the discoloration and the flecking of the paint in The Scream.” Under high-humidity conditions, the yellow

cadmium sulfide pigment reacts with moisture in the environment to turn into cadmium sulfate, which is white. “There were some hints that humidity might play a large role, but I don’t think we realized until this current study that it was really the essential agent of degradation,” says Jennifer Mass, president of Scientific Analysis of Fine Art in New York, who was involved in both the earlier Matisse and this Munch study. The Cadmium Yellow pigments in pieces like The Scream fade in high humidity.

While these pigments have proven unstable, without them, we never would have seen the bold work by Van Gogh, Munch, or Matisse, which inspired countless artists after them.

PRESERVING PIGMENTS FOR THE AGES The results of this recent research on Chrome Yellow and Cadmium Yellow degradation are helping museums improve how they store and display priceless works of art. Van Gogh’s Sunflowers, for example, will no longer leave Amsterdam. Director of the Van Gogh Museum Axel Rüger explained in a press release in January 2019 that the pigments “are stable, but very sensitive to vibrations and changes in humidity and temperature. It is therefore important that the painting is moved about as little as possible, and that it is displayed in a stable climate.” And when the Munch Museum in Oslo, Norway, moves to its new site across town in the near future, they plan to display The Scream in an enclosed cabinet. “We have to consider a lower humidity environment to be sure that the [degradation] is controlled and it will not progress over time,” says Irina Sandu, a conservation scientist at the Munch Museum and a co-author of the study analyzing The Scream. While chromium- and cadmium-based pigments have proven to be unstable, without them we never would have seen the bold work by Van Gogh, Munch, or Matisse, which inspired countless artists after them and will inspire many more in the future. So we can be thankful that Van Gogh took his own prescient advice: “All the colours that Impressionism has made fashionable are unstable, all the more reason boldly to use them too raw, time will only soften them too much.” D Stephanie DeMarco is a science writer based in Los Angeles. J U N E 2 02 1 . D IS C OVER

OUT THERE BY ERIC BETZ

In Search of the Dark Ages A TELESCOPE PLANNED FOR THE FARSIDE OF THE MOON COULD PLUG A 500-MILLION-YEAR HOLE IN COSMIC HISTORY.

ome 13.8 billion years ago, our universe burst into being. In a fraction of a second, it ballooned from subatomic to the size of a grapefruit. And as the cosmos grew and grew, it also cooled, until the building blocks of matter — subatomic particles called quarks and gluons — could form. Eventually, this quark soup aggregated into atoms. Atoms merged into larger molecules. Gas filled the universe. Yet the cosmos would sit like this — dark — for hundreds of millions of years before light shone from the first stars and galaxies. We understand parts of what happened in the early

D IS C O V E R M A G A Z I N E .C O M

How did we go from a gas-ﬁlled universe to the one we now see in the night sky? A telescope on the Moon may help to provide an answer.

TELESCOPES ON THE MOON In 1986, nearly 100 of the world’s leading astronomers gathered at a hotel in Houston to present dozens of bold ideas for building telescopes on our natural satellite. Even before the Apollo program, scientists had argued that lunar telescopes were one of the best scientific justifications for going to the moon. That push helped land a small telescope on Apollo 16. And by the mid-1980s, the idea finally seemed ripe. NASA’s space shuttle program was thriving and plans for a space station were taking shape. A return to the moon seemed not far off.

ILLUSTRIS COLLABORATION

A massive galaxy cluster is intertwined with threads of dark matter (blue) and gas (orange). The formation of large-scale structures seen today are thought to have originated during the universe’s mysterious “dark ages.”

universe. But a huge blank still haunts astronomers. They call it the “dark ages” because, with no starlight to study, they’re left guessing where all the familiar stuff came from. How did we go from a gas-filled universe to the one we now see in the night sky? “The early universe had no galaxies, just hot stuff. As things cooled off, something had to happen before the galaxies formed,” says Nobel Prize-winning astrophysicist John Mather of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center. “Honestly, we’ve got lots of stories and lots of predictions, but no measurements.” Unravelling this mystery is “one of the great objectives of modern-day astronomy,” he adds. To solve it, scientists and engineers have identified an unlikely location for their work, one that could help shape the next generation of astronomical research: the farside of the moon. Before the first stars, the universe didn’t emit visible light, but the primordial matter that pervaded the universe likely did emit radio signals. Astronomers have never seen these wavelengths because they’re so stretched out that they can’t be detected over the radio chatter bouncing around Earth. The farside of the moon is the one place in the inner solar system where radio astronomers can find some peace and quiet. Its surface always faces away from Earth, so if astronomers could build a radio telescope there, they’d have a natural noise barrier.

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OUT THERE

FROM DARKNESS TO LIGHT Cosmic microwave background (CMB)

Clouds of neutral hydrogen

Big Bang

HOT IONIZED PLASMA

Inflation ends 20 10–32 second minutes

104

First stars form

DARK AGES BEGIN

105

106

107

First galaxies form

Present day

REIONIZATION

108

109

1010

Logarithmic scale (years)

10 seconds—20 minutes Big Bang nucleosynthesis creates deuterium, helium, and lithium nuclei.

Then, less than three weeks after the Houston meeting, Space Shuttle Challenger crashed. America’s revived moon program would crash in the years ahead too. Still, not everyone gave up the idea. Ever since that meeting 35 years ago, Jack O. Burns has been the lead evangelist for building telescopes on the moon. He’s pushed for lunar telescopes through three separate return-to-the-moon initiatives. “My job since the 1980s has been leading the charge on what science we could do in terms of astronomy once we get to the moon,” says Burns, who directs the NASA-funded Network for Exploration and Space Science. For the first time, Burns thinks this crazy idea might actually become a reality. After Donald Trump was elected president in 2016, Burns served as the only scientist on the new administration’s NASA transition team. The ideas that the team came up with later became the Artemis program, which aims to land lunar astronauts by 2024.

D IS C O V E R M A G A Z I N E .C O M

380,000 years The CMB is produced as neutral atoms form and photons break free.

Top: Astronomers understand parts of the early universe, but huge blanks still remain. Bottom: In 1972, Apollo 16 placed the first Moonbased observatory.

300 million—500 million years Energetic light from the first stars and galaxies begins to break apart atoms, reionizing the universe.

1 billion years The universe is fully transparent to light. Structures form over billions of years.

Burns also presented his ideas for using lunar telescopes to unravel the cosmic dark ages. He sees this as the “killer app” — the scientific case that finally makes lunar telescopes indispensable. Over dinner, he sold then-NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine on the idea, too. Burns has now completed a NASAfunded engineering study on a project he calls FARSIDE, or Farside Array for Radio Science Investigations of the Dark ages and Exoplanets. The entire radio telescope would pack into a robotic lunar lander that would touch down on the farside of the moon. Then, four small rovers would slowly uncoil nearly 30 miles of wire and 128 antennas into a spiral pattern covering some 6 miles.

TECHNOLOGY CATCHES UP In the past, astronomers’ moon telescope proposals relied on lunar colonies and multibillion space programs. “The only way we could conceive of putting scientific instruments on the moon was

FROM TOP: ROEN KELLY/DISCOVER; U.S. NAVAL RESEARCH LABORATORY

1 second Matter and light collide frequently.

FROM TOP: STANISLAW TOKARSKI/SHUTTERSTOCK; COURTESY CALTECH/JPL (2)

with astronauts,” Burns says. But thanks to modern robotics and the emergence of private spaceflight companies, FARSIDE’s price tag is less than the cost of a Mars rover. For more than a year, the FARSIDE team has been working with Jeff Bezos’ space company, Blue Origin. While Elon Musk dreams of Mars, Bezos’ ultimate goal is to have humans working and living on the moon — including doing science. To serve that goal, he’s pumped billions of dollars into reusable rockets and a cargo lander called Blue Moon that can carry several metric tons of weight to the lunar surface. With this spacecraft, Blue Origin aims to open the door to lunar colonies. For NASA, it’s also a way to get American astronauts back on the moon. But that kind of cargo capacity is more than enough to deploy a telescope, plus the rovers to build it, in a single trip. Burns isn’t the only one pursuing it. The science potential of the lunar farside has attracted interest from other researchers — and other countries. Astronomers have never observed in this part of the radio spectrum before, and researchers are eager to be the first to see what’s hiding there. It could offer a new test for standard cosmology. And the measurements are so sensitive, they potentially could even detect electromagnetic fields around exoplanets, helping identify habitable planets. “You’ve got this radio-quiet environment on the other side of the moon that enables very sensitive measurements that you just can’t get any other way,” says Steve Squyres, Blue Origin’s chief scientist. “That environment is very, very conducive to doing breakthrough science.”

THE MOON RUSH Even NASA recently funded another lunar telescope study. The proposal suggests using small robots to climb cliffs and suspend a radio observatory inside of a farside lunar crater. China is chasing similar goals. The country has already deployed a small telescope on the lunar farside with its Chang’e 4 lander. Now, it’s moving forward with plans for missions surprisingly similar to the ones Burns has been pushing for decades. In the meantime, Burns received NASA funding to complete a concept study and develop instruments for a project called the Dark Ages Polarimetry Pathfinder, or DAPPER. This small satellite will be deployed from a spacecraft “bus,” which the agency plans to launch as soon as 2022.

The FARSIDE telescope and its attendant rovers would reach the moon using Blue Origin’s Blue Moon lander.

And instead of sitting on the moon’s surface, it will make initial observations of the dark ages and cosmic dawn during the brief part of its orbit where it’s behind the moon. But with NASA and private companies racing to put boots on the moon as quickly as possible, astronomers have grown nervous that the radio noise pollution problems will follow them off Earth. “There’s an imperative to do it soon,” Squyres says. “While the radio environment on the farside of the moon is quiet now, it’s not likely to stay that way.” If scientists can start building research stations on the lunar farside, they may be able to create a long-standing precedent that this region is protected from development, like Antarctica. But wait too long, and they’ll miss the window. “We’re ready to go now,” Burns says. “There’s no question we can do this. And someone will do it, whether it’s NASA or the Chinese or Jeff Bezos. I’m convinced it will be done.” D Eric Betz is a science and tech writer for Discover, Astronomy and others. J U N E 2 02 1 . D IS C OV ER

#ScienceIRL BY ANAMARIA SILIC

SANDSTONE FALLS, NEW RIVER GORGE, WEST VIRGINIA

or West Virginia, a big surprise was tucked inside this winter’s $900 billion COVID-19 federal stimulus bill: New River Gorge became the 63rd U.S. national park, and the first national park in the state. The river, or “The New” in local vernacular, is already a haven for outdoor enthusiasts — ideal for hiking, fishing, rafting, rock climbing and camping — and attracts nearly 1 million annual visitors. The river is believed to be one of the oldest in North America. For centuries, it played a key role for Indigenous tribes, though, according to legend, some called it the “river of death.” Later, the waterway supported the coalmining industry, which became a backbone of the West Virginia economy in the late 1800s.

D IS C O V E R M A G A Z I N E .C O M

That mining history includes a controversial method still used today called mountaintop removal, in which companies use explosives to blast mountain peaks and access coal deposits. The practice has had devastating environmental and health impacts, damaging over 2,000 miles of streams. One 2011 study found twice as many cases of cancer in people in a mountaintop mining community, compared to a similar non-mining community in West Virginia.

The park designation could signal an economic shift toward recreation in the Mountain State, veering away from coal and the environmental scars in its wake. New River Gorge National Park and Preserve is home to some of the country’s best whitewater rafting and more than 1,400 rockclimbing routes on sandstone cliffs. Seasonal visitors also find more than a thousand vibrant plant species and summer fireflies flickering above the chilly river water. D

SCIENCE IN REAL LIFE We want to see your awe-inspiring photos. Tag #ScienceIRL and @Discover.Magazine on Instagram to share encounters with science in your cities, nature, the arts and beyond.

DISCOVER (ISSN 0274-7529, USPS# 555-190) is published eight times per year (January/ February, March/April, May, June, July/August, September/October, November and December). Vol. 42, no. 4. Published by Kalmbach Media Co., 21027 Crossroads Circle, P.O. Box 1612, Waukesha, WI 53187-1612. Periodical postage paid at Waukesha, WI, and at additional mailing offices. POSTMASTER: Send address changes to DISCOVER, P.O. Box 8520, Big Sandy, TX 75755. Canada Publication Agreement # 40010760. Back issues available. All rights reserved. Nothing herein contained may be reproduced without written permission of Kalmbach Media Co., 21027 Crossroads Circle, P.O. Box 1612, Waukesha, WI 531871612. Printed in the U.S.A.

GARY HARTLEY

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