serg seu6e4

S P R IN G 2 020

WHAT CAME BEFORE nostalgia’s life-or-death origin story 10,000 steps is an old lie undoing dams to resurrect our rivers new evidence: dogs tamed themselves

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CONTENTS CHARTED

46 What ancient teeth could reveal about the modern microbiome

54 Will crushing old dams give America’s rivers a much-needed fresh start?

62 Meet the amateur cartographers bringing

use to decide what dinosaurs looked like

that were absolutely perfect from the start

agriculture can help solve

history along 143 miles of railroad track BEATA PREDKO/ALAMY

08 If history’s an ocean, humanity is a raindrop

34 Camera tech that’s endured since the ’70s

10 What our eyes teach us about evolution

36 Essentials you need to cook it old-school

12 Copper: from prehistoric weapon to electric circuit

38 Ideal raw materials for your next project

14 National fare that originated elsewhere

40 The century-long journey of electric cars

16 Yesterday’s garbage?

Today’s artifacts

42 Basketball’s most popular kicks, then and now

BIG Q S

TALES FROM THE FIELD

18 Can old art advance modern science?

103 Everyone sleeps.

No one knows why

20 How do animals find their way back home?

104 Signs a baseball card is an original—or a fake

20 The big bang, without making your head explode

104 Sorry, 10,000 steps is a decades-old lie

20 What caused Alaska’s tuberculosis outbreak

106 The funky genesis of human anatomy

22 Should we engineer a perfect child?

108 Popping the top on beer’s 13,000-year-old buzz

24 Secrets of the world’s most enduring cities

108 When we moved to caves, bugs were waiting

24 Where the idyllic front yard first put down roots

110 The first light in the universe, recorded

26 The reason we’re so attached to the past

111 Why so few people are left-handed

GOODS

HEAD TRIP

28 An analog reboot of the first video game

113 From Aristotle to Escher, the canonical illusions

30 Where the world’s priciest coffee comes from

BEHIND THE COVER

32 Scribble and doodle the old-fashioned way

126 This edition’s cover, in its earliest form

COVER PHOTOGRAPH BY

TH E VOO RH ES

94 The quest to unravel the co-domestication of people and dogs P O P S C I.CO M / S P R I N G 2 0 2 0

3

SPRING 2020

EDITOR’S LETTER

Editor-in-Chief Joe Brown Executive Editor Corinne Iozzio Group Digital Director Amy Schellenbaum Design Director Russ Smith

to beginnings: new and old IN MY FIRST CRACK AT THIS

note, I invoked Popular Science’s inaugural editor’s letter, written in 1872. It was a pretty good idea, and my draft was going well, but about two paragraphs in, I scrapped it. I realized we have a 150th birthday coming up, so I’ll wait till 2022 to mine that vein of sentiment.

Why share this insight into my creative process? Because this issue is about origins, and that’s how I got this thing rolling. Giddyup.

You might notice that we look to the past more than usual in this edition, but hey, that’s where the origin stories are. Hundreds of thousands of years ago, for example, the symbiotic bond between humans and dogs formed. While conventional wisdom goes that we domesticated the Canis familiaris, new evidence indicates that they actually tamed themselves.

Kat McGowan came through with a helluva tale about this unique relationship on page 94.

The tech team took to the annals as well, with a retrospective of some of the modern era’s most epic innovations: products that have barely changed since they first rocked the world. Wonder Bread even sent us a loaf just for the photo shoot on page 71. It’s the most ideal specimen the company could pop out of the oven, carefully packed and rush-shipped to our offices. The resulting picture does not disappoint.

Hopefully you’ll notice that the issue itself is a bit of a new beginning for us. The design staff spiffed up our appearance, and the result is a stunner, retaining our classic quarterly bones but with fresh layers of modern muscle.

The redesign is more than an aesthetic overhaul; we added a new section called Big Qs to the front of the magazine. It’s a delightful repository of headscratchers that resolve into ohhhh! moments. Is there a scientific reason that humans cling to the past?

Check out page 26 to find out.

You might expect a magazine full of origin stories to feel like a history lesson, but that wasn’t the intention and it’s not the result. We look back in time, yes, but more as a marker for where we stand on

EDITORIAL Features Editor Susan Murcko Articles Editor Rachel Feltman Senior Editors Purbita Saha, Chuck Squatriglia Technology Editor Stan Horaczek DIY Editor John Kennedy Senior Producer Tom McNamara Engagement Editor Ryan Perry Associate Editor Claire Maldarelli Associate Producer Jason Lederman Assistant Editors Jessica Boddy, Sara Chodosh, Sandra Gutierrez, Rob Verger Commerce Editor Billy Cadden Editorial Assistant Sara Kiley Watson Copy Chief Cindy Martin Researchers Cadence Bambenek, Jake Bittle, Diane Kelly, Hilary McClellen, Erika Villani, Grace Wade, Wudan Yan Interns Molly Glick, Jess Romeo ART AND PHOTOGRAPHY Photo Director Thomas Payne Art Director Katie Belloff Consulting Production Manager Glenn Orzepowski EDITORIAL PRODUCTION Group Managing Editor Jean McKenna Managing Editor Margaret Nussey CONTRIBUTING EDITORS Brooke Borel, Kat Eschner, Tom Foster, William Gurstelle, Gregory Mone, Sarah Scoles, P.W. Singer, Nick Stockton, James Vlahos, The Voorhes (photography) Executive Vice President Gregory D. Gatto Vice President, Editorial Director Joe Brown Group Creative Director Sean Johnston BONNIER MEDIA Senior Vice President, Managing Director John Graney Vice President, Sales Jeff Timm Digital Sales Manager Lee Verdecchia Corporate Sales Directors Kristine Bihm, Ann Blach, Kelly Hediger, Cynthia Lapporte, Doug Leipprandt, Matt Levy, Cyndi Ratcliff, Jeff Roberge Direct Response and Classifieds Sales Representatives Brian Luke, Chip Parham Marketing Sales Development Director Charlotte Grima Integrated Marketing Manager Ed Raymond Associate Director Eshonda Caraway-Evans Brand Manager Vanessa Vazquez Associate Creative Director Steve Gianaca Business Operations Financial Director Tara Bisciello Advertising Coordinator Nicky Nedd Digital Content Production and Presentation Director Michellina Jones Producer Daniel McSwain Bonnier Custom Insights Director Michele Siegel Research Analyst Ava Ziegler Production Group Director Rina V. Murray Associate Director Kelly Kramer Weekley Artist Pete Coffin Consumer Marketing Director Sally Murphy, ProCirc Public Relations Manager Cathy Hebert

Chairman Dr. Jens Mueffelmann Chief Executive Officer Eric Zinczenko Chief Financial Officer Joachim Jaginder Executive VP, Bonnier Media Gregory D. Gatto Executive VP, Bonnier Subscriptions David Ritchie Senior VP, Consumer Products Elise Contarsy Senior VP, Events Jonathan Moore Senior VP, Digital Operations David Butler Senior VP, Managing Director, Corp. Sales John Graney VP, Public Relations Perri Dorset VP, Data Science and Analytics Mark Crone VP, Enterprise Solutions Shawn Macey General Counsel Jeremy Thompson Human Resources Director Kim Putman This product is from sustainably managed forests and controlled sources.

FOR CUSTOMER SERVICE AND SUBSCRIPTION QUESTIONS, such as renewals, address changes, email preferences, billing, and account status, go to popsci.com/ cs. You can also call 800-289-9399 or 515-237-3697, or write to Popular Science, P.O. Box 6364, Harlan, IA 51593-1864. For reprints, email reprints@bonniercorp.com Occasionally, we make portions of our subscriber list available to carefully screened companies that offer products and services we think might be of interest to you.

If you do not want to receive these offers, please advise us at 515-237-3697.

4

ILLUSTRATION BY BIJOU

KARMAN

CONTRIBUTORS BY

S A N D R A G U T I E R R EZ

3

2

1

1. Katie Belloff

2. Gregory Reid

3. Brian Barth

4. Sarah Scoles

• The daughter of artistic, musical parents, Katie Belloff, PopSci’s art director, knew from an early age that she wanted to embrace her creative side. (She recalls marker-ink-stained hands as a child.) While in college, she fell in love with publishing, and experimented with screen printing and letterpress. She used the latter technique on page 26, employing wooden type to create distinctive headline text. Striving for a playful vibe, Belloff led the redesign of PopSci that debuts with the issue you’re holding; it has new fonts and a color palette that will change with each edition. She describes the result as “clean and fun.”

• When he was 18, Gregory Reid wanted to be a doctor. But there was a problem: He didn’t like blood. After just one year as a pre-med student, he decided to turn his photography hobby into a career, graduating with a BFA instead. Though he specializes in shooting colorful still lifes, Reid left his comfort zone to produce the photos on page 70 in blackand-white. His grayscale images reveal the timeless shapes of classics such as the Swiss Army knife and Leica M-series camera.

“The whole world is designed,” he says. “Some other person did that, spent hours creating it—I have to make sure that doesn’t get lost.”

• Back when he worked as a high-end landscape designer, Brian Barth would often include fruit and vegetable gardens in his creations. Barth, who holds a master’s in urban planning, has always been fascinated with where our food comes from; when he became a journalist, it made sense to incorporate agriculture into his beat. On page 82, he explains how age-old farming techniques that sequester carbon could help mitigate climate change. “I was one of those people who demonized corn and soybean farmers,” he says of a group once known for poor environmental practices, “but most just want to do the right thing.”

• Contributing editor Sarah Scoles grew up watching launches at the John F. Kennedy Space Center from her childhood home, experiences that sparked an obsession with all things stellar. She holds an undergraduate degree in astrophysics, and now reports on the field for mainstream audiences. In her second book, They Are Already Here, out in March 2020, she explores why the UFO-seeking community wants to believe in aliens. On page 62, Scoles—who writes on a variety of topics for PopSci—tells the story of amateur cartographers on a mission to use up-to-the-minute data to map and make sense of the world.

6

S P R I N G 2 0 2 0 / P O P S C I.CO M

FROM LEFT: STAN HORACZEK; COURTESY CONTRIBUTORS (3)

4

with

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C H A R T E D SPRING 2020

4,000,000,000 YEARS AGO First life

2BN YEARS AGO

1BN YEARS AGO Jellyfish ancestors

Mammals

Vertebrates

Dinosaurs

Cambrian explosion

Permian-Triassic extinction Bees

Triassic-Jurassic extinction

Ants

Birds Stegosaurs

4,000,000 YEARS AGO

3M YEARS AGO

2M YEARS AGO

Homo sapiens

4,000 YEARS AGO Hieroglyphs

3K YEARS AGO

Olympics

Roman Empire

Black Death

Copernican revolution

8

S P R I N G 2 0 2 0 / P O P S C I.CO M

2K YEARS AGO

H U M A N S H AV E G O T T E N

DATASCOPE

a lot done in 300,000 years: We invented agriculture, developed writing systems, built cities, created the internet, and shrugged off gravity to land on the moon. These innovations make our past seem long—and stuffed with significance.

pale blue blip

BY NI C OL E WETSMAN / INFOGRAPHIC BY SET R ESET

But in the brief history of life, everything we’ve ever accomplished fits into a tiny sliver of time—just 0.008 percent of the entire continuum shown below. This is how the rise of the animal kingdom stretches out compared with our relatively insignificant existence.

First multicellular life

3BN YEARS AGO

Eukaryotes

Four-legged animals

Sharks Octopuses Velociraptor

T. Rex

Dinosaur extinction

Monkeys

Apes

Proto-primates

Hominids

Homo genus Writing Bronze Age

Humans migrated to North America 1M YEARS AGO

Pyramids

Agriculture

Cave paintings

Animal domestication

Mesopotamian/Sumerian civilization

Great Wall of China

Gunpowder Steam engine

1K YEARS AGO

PopSci

Antibiotics

Moon walk

Birth of average-aged person alive today

TODAY P O P S C I.CO M / S P R I N G 2 0 2 0

9

Alouatta other Euarchontoglires Hemichordata

Echinodermata

Placozoa

Ctenophora

Porifera

AL PHOT DIRECTION ORECEPTION

Cnidaria

Tunicata

LOW -RES VISION

Prosimians

other Platyrrhines

Ateles Callicebus

AT E S

PLACENTAL MAMMALS

Acoela

HIGH-R O ES VISI N

other Catarrhines

Pongo other Placentalia

Caenolestidae

Hylobates Microbiotheria

Sauropsida

S

Lagothrix

Homo

Pan Gorilla

Acrobatidae Vombatiformes

Phalangeridae

MMAL

LS

IM

Cephalochordata

Nemertea

Tarsipedidae

Petauridae

Pseudocheiridae

Hypsiprymnodontidae

Didelphidae

Monotremes

Platyhelminthes

Annelida

Notoryctidae

Peramelidae

Thylacomyidae

Potoroidae

Macropodidae Chaeropodidae

Polyplacophora Bryozoa

Onychophora

Tardigrada

Nematoda

Thylacinidae

Myrmecobiidae

Nautiloidea

Decapodiformes

Octopodiformes

Dasyuridae

Insecta

Crustacea

Bivalvia

Brachiopoda Chelicerata Kinorhyncha

MA

MAR SU PIA

PR

N O VISION

TRICHROMACY / Our prede-

LENS / Vertebrate eyes evolved

cessors copied and tweaked a color-sensing cone, perhaps to spot red fruit on leaves. A few other mammals pulled the same move.

millions of years after we split from cephalopods but share the same basic design: Light enters a hole in front and hits receptors in back.

ABSTRACTED

origin of the peepers

BY S A R A C H O D OS H / ILLUSTRATION BY JAC QU I 10

OA K L EY

S P R I N G 2 0 2 0 / P O P S C I.CO M

EVEN ACROSS OCEANS AND

millennia, nature finds a way to arrive at the same solutions. Just look at eyes: We share our lens-like optics with distant species such as octopuses, and our trichromatic spectrum of vision with

certain primates and marsupials that evolved this third receptor independently from us. These traits all arose through classic divergent evolution, in which branches split off the tree of life as animals fill ecological niches. Yet,

because some features address common issues—the need to see clearly, and in color—the adaptations also represent an opposing phenomenon called convergent evolution. Here, we’ve illustrated how both paths come together.

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Actor and Volunteer “Let’s recycle right!®” Spokesperson

TURN BACK TIME

STONE WAS CUTTING-EDGE

go for bronze

BY G R AC E WA D E / ILLUSTRATION BY

12

WES L COCKX

until about 10,000 years ago, when our ancestors discovered a better material from which to fashion their arrows and axes: copper. Archaeologists believe it was the first metal manipulated

by human hands, and since then, it has enabled some of our greatest inventions. Now copper is the third-most-consumed metal in the world. These six technologies show how it helped shape our civilization over the millennia.

Metallurgy The oldest metal object unearthed to date is a tiny 6th millennium BCE copper awl found in the Middle East. Because it’s commonly found as a pure metal instead of mixed in ores, copper was ideal for human’s invention of metallurgy, the process of smelting and casting metals.

This enabled early civilizations to wield hardier axes and arrows.

Bronze Copper is a fairly soft metal, but you can mix it with others to create tough alloys. Around 3000 BCE, Sumerians combined it with tin to make bronze, which is stronger, easier to cast into molds, and better at holding a sharp edge than either element alone. That’s because pairing up sets of differently sized atoms makes it difficult for them to slip past each other.

Coinage Modern pennies contain only 2.5 percent copper (the rest is made of much-cheaper zinc), but some of the oldest-known coins were bronze, which is up to 95 percent copper. Copper provides lots of corrosion resistance, keeping change in shape as it passes hands, and its malleability made it easy to emboss with images of leaders and other cultural symbols.

Antimicrobial surfaces Copper is toxic to many singlecelled organisms, killing a wide range of microbes—including some that can evade our best antibiotics—in two hours or less.

Some hospitals now take advantage with door knobs and bedrails made of the metal. This is an old trick; healers prescribed copper powder for ailments like ear infections and burns in ancient times.

Copper roofing We’ve been using copper to cap buildings since the 3rd century BCE, including in structures like the Pantheon, because it can flex into intricate pitches and designs that rule out wood or tiles. The material undergoes a chemical reaction when exposed to open air that results in a green outer layer, which is more than just a charming color: It also prevents erosion.

Electricity Not only is copper the secondbest electrical conductor after silver, but it’s also extremely ductile, meaning you can stretch it out into thin strands without breaking it. Since Alessandro Volta’s invention of the battery in 1800, copper wiring has been crucial to all things electric, from circuit boards to the cables that connect us to the internet.

SPRING 2020 / POPSCI.COM

MAPQUEST

globe to table Kung Pao chicken/chilis Tien tsin, or Chinese red pepper, is named for the port city of Tianjin. But chilis don’t originate in the People’s Republic.

Though they’re a key ingredient in many classic dishes, such as the Sichuan staple known as Kung Pao chicken, the spicy plant is native to Mexico.

Columbus introduced it to Europeans during the Columbian exchange, who traded it east throughout the 16th century.

Tempura/wheat batter

Tempura is a cornerstone of Japanese cuisine; chefs batter and deep-fry everything from shrimp to shiitake mushrooms.

But the practice originated with the Portuguese, who ate battered green beans called peixinhos da horta—“little fish of the garden”—on holy days when Catholics abstained from meat.

Traders brought their method to Japan in the 1540s, and they left their recipes behind.

Chocolate/cocoa beans

The cocoa bean emerged in Mesoamerica, where indigenous people used it in religious ceremonies, traded it as a currency, and fermented it into alcohol.

Europeans didn’t like the bitter taste, so they mixed cocoa with sugar, honey, and vanilla (another New World contribution). In the early 1800s, Swiss chocolatiers made it smoother and mixed in condensed milk, creating their singularly creamy chocolate.

14

S P R I N G 2 0 2 0 / P O P S C I.CO M

Key

Kung Pao chicken/ chilis

Chocolate/ cocoa beans

Lasagna/ tomatoes

Tempura/ wheat batter

Banana split/ bananas

Fufu/ cassava

PEACH

COBBLER

AND

ballpark peanuts have something in common: They’re classic American dishes built on decidedly un-American crops.

The state fruit of Georgia originated in China, while peanuts (just like “Irish” potatoes) hail from South America.

BY

ELEANOR CUMMINS

These aren’t gastronomical exceptions either. From the heyday of the Silk Road to the Columbian Exchange, globalization has been bringing humans— and their stomachs—closer together for thousands of years. Here we trace some iconic foods back to their foreign homelands.

/ ILLUSTRATIONS BY

OS CA R B O LT O N G R E E N

Banana split/bananas

Latrobe, Pennsylvania, and Wilmington, Ohio, both claim to have invented the banana split by 1907. But the key ingredient comes thanks to the domestication of seedy, starchy plantains some 7,000 years ago in Southeast Asia. Americans didn’t enjoy the fruits of those labors until the Centennial Exposition in 1876, where vendors sold bananas peeled and wrapped in foil for a dime.

Lasagna/tomatoes

Italians have been making lasagna since ancient Rome— only without the tomatoes. The bulbous fruit, which originated in the Andes, first appeared in Italian records in 1548 as an ornamental plant. It wasn’t until 1692 that cookbooks featured it as an edible ingredient. By the 19th century, the tomato— cheap, growable year-round, and tasty—was central to the newly unified country’s cuisine.

Fufu/cassava

Peach cobbler/ peaches

Teatime/ tea

Stuffed squash/ zucchini

Irish coddle/ potatoes

Honey roasted nuts/peanuts

Quinoa bowls/ quinoa

Cassava root provides food for 500 million Africans. In countries like Ghana, a doughy mush of cassava (or plantains or yams) called fufu goes with most meals. But the woody shrub originated on the other side of the Atlantic. Portuguese sailors and slave traders introduced the crop to Africa in the 16th century, where its ability to survive intense rains and drought made it an indispensable food source.

P O P S C I.CO M / S P R I N G 2 0 2 0

15

LAYER CAKE

all man’s trash HUMANITY’S LEGACY LIES IN

our garbage. Trash offers archaeologists insight into the day-to-day lifestyles of people long past. Even today, we’re leaving future excavators plenty of specimens to ponder: Most Americans produce around 4.5 pounds of waste each day. This time-traveling dumpster dive shows some of the most revealing junk we’ve accumulated over the past couple of millennia— and the things we’re tossing now that will exist long after we’re gone.

BY J E SS RO MEO / ILLUSTRATION BY

16

ERI K SVETOFT

6

3/New England 18th century On Colonial farmsteads, people literally pitched their refuse out windows. Archaeologists discovered one 18th-century property strewn with broken bottles, snapped pipes, and cracked earthenware.

The waste hints at frugality: Everything they tossed was irreparably broken.

4/Old England 19th century The Industrial Revolution, which began around 1760, sparked an increase in consumerism. Rubbish from Victorian manors in East Anglia is packed with singleuse glass bottles and metal containers as a result. The litter also includes the disembodied heads of popular porcelain dolls.

1/Egypt 2nd century BCE-6th CE An arid desert dumpsite outside the city of Oxyrhynchus preserved 500,000 papyrus fragments—receipts, tax forms, horoscopes, and forgotten works of Sappho and Sophocles—that illuminate what residents owned, who they married, and which sexy novels they read most.

5/United States 20th century Plastics popularized during World War II began to take over our lives when soldiers came home. The first Tupperware hit the market in 1946, followed by staples like Lego bricks and grocery bags. We’ve used and discarded more than 8 billion metric tons of plastic since.

2/Israel 5th century Byzantine landfills like the one in Elusa (in what is now the Negev desert) served as the final resting place for ashes, shells, ceramic shards, olive pits, and wine jars. Carbon dating of the trash links the town’s sudden collapse to the same time period as a mini Ice Age brought on by nearby volcanic eruptions.

6/Worldwide 21st century We toss more than 40 million tons of cracked phone carcasses and other e-waste each year. Much is shipped to developing countries, where workers strip precious bits— like rare-earth metals—and chuck the rest. This “recycling” will leave mountains of petrified plastic, toxic chemicals, and metal scraps.

5

4

3

2

1 S P R I N G 2 0 2 0 / P O P S C I.CO M

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BIG

S

POV

COULD DOING THINGS THE OLD-FASHIONED WAY MAKE US BETTER MODERN SCIENTISTS? BY

K AT E BAG G A L EY

/ PHOTOGRAPH BY

M A R I U S BUG G E

TODAY, WE IMAGINE LAB EXPERIMENTS AS PART OF A

separate realm from fine arts like painting or trades like carpentry.

But artisans helped lay the groundwork for the scientific revolution.

For the past five years, Pamela Smith, a historian of science at Columbia University in New York, has devoted herself to re-creating their long-forgotten techniques. “So much exploration, experimentation, and innovation happens in craft,” she says. “It’s the same as science; it’s the human exploration of the material world.”

Smith didn’t get into academia to spend her days gilding and mixing. “I’m not very handy,” she admits. Artisans caught her attention when she penned a dissertation on Johann Joachim Becher, a 17th-century writer who pondered the economics of alchemy and crafts. Then, while doing research for her 2004 book, The Body of the Artisan, she came across a 16th-century French manuscript containing nearly 1,000 sets of instructions, covering subjects from cannon casting to finding the best sand in Toulouse.

The author’s intent remains as mysterious as their name; they may have been creating a manual or simply taking notes for their own records. But Smith was struck mainly by the fact that she didn’t truly grasp any of the skills the author described. “You simply can’t get an understanding of that handwork by reading about it,” she says. So in 2014, she founded Columbia’s Making and Knowing Project to probe (and digitize) the tome’s many secrets.

Though Smith did get her hands on that choice Toulousian sand, doing things the old-fashioned way isn’t just about mucking around with French mud. Reconstructing the work of people who lived

18

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centuries ago can reveal how they viewed the world, what objects filled their homes, and what went on in the workshops that produced them. It can even address present-day problems: In 2015, scientists discovered that a 10th-century Anglo-Saxon remedy for eye infections could kill antibiotic-resistant bacteria.

The work has also yielded insights for museums, Smith says. One must know how an object was made in order to preserve it. What’s more, reconstructions might be the only way to know what treasures looked like before time wore them down. Scholars have seen this idea in practice with ancient Greek and Roman statues. These sculptures weren’t just austere white marble; they were painted a rainbow of striking colors with long-degraded pigments. We can’t appreciate these kinds of vibrant details without seeing works of art as they originally appeared—something Smith believes you can do only once you have a road map for replicating the effect.

She’s put the manuscript’s theories into practice, crafting mock gems from quartz and copper powder, and affixing taxidermy rats with sparrow wings. Scholars and nobles in early modern Europe collected such things for their Kunstkammern, cabinets of curiosities—as well as astronomical instruments, clockwork animals, and other marvels. Creators were fascinated by what it meant for human hands to imitate (or even surpass) the world’s natural wonders. Philosopher René Descartes proposed that studying how a machine or living creature worked was the key to understanding it, and that such tinkering could serve to bring humans closer to God. Smith’s ultimate goal is to link the worlds of art and science back together. Many of her students are historians who had never set foot in a lab or studio before tackling the manuscript. Smith believes that bringing its recipes to life can foster a kind of learning that thrives on experimentation, teamwork, and problem solving.

This belief has precedent. Back when science—then called “the new philosophy”—took shape, academics looked to artisans for help understanding and manipulating the natural world. One can trace a single thread from Renaissance-era timepieces, which nobles demanded grow increasingly intricate, to the clockwork automatons that preceded robots and computers. Even microscopes and telescopes were invented by way of artistic tinkering, as craftspeople experimented with glass and lens grinding to better bend light.

If we can rediscover the value of hands-on experience and craftwork, Smith says, we can marry the best of our modern insights with the homespun handiness of our scientific forebears.

BIG Q S

EXPLAIN THE BIG BANG BY LIKE I’M 5 R O B V E RG E R

LITTLE Q

HOW DO ANIMALS FIND THEIR WA Y H O M E ?

BY

P U R B I TA S A H A

FOR SOME SPECIES, NEIGHBORHOOD PRIDE IS MORE

about survival than sentiment. Many creatures travel hundreds of miles to find resources before returning home to mate. How do they know where to go? Signature smells and magnetism help migrators, but some parts of the process are a mystery.

Aquatic animals generally just follow currents to open waters, but aromatic awareness comes in handy when it’s time to reverse course to reproduce. Lake sturgeon, for one, hatch in the pebbled depths of Wisconsin’s Kewaunee River and wend up to 100 miles to the Great Lakes, where they mature for a decade or two before the big paddle back. Less than 4 percent settle somewhere new.

“They imprint on the river they’re born in,” explains Jessica Collier, a biologist at the US Fish and Wildlife Service in Green Bay. Sturgeon may use their whiskerlike barbels to sense proteins in the water, allowing them to sniff out their route.

Species covering larger distances can tap Earth’s magnetism instead. Arctic terns fly 12,000 miles from pole to pole; loggerhead turtles cruise 8,000 miles from Japan to Baja; and bogong moths flit 600 miles across Australia to winter in caves. The bugs are so precise that they often mate and die on the same stretch of rock where they were born.

Still, the moths don’t rely entirely on the planet’s pull, says Eric Warrant, a zoologist from Lund University in Sweden. He likens them to hikers handling a compass: They set a course with cardinal directions, then adjust based on visual landmarks. But even this multisensory system doesn’t tell the whole story.

“Their parents have been dead for three months when they’re ready to take wing,” Warrant says.

They’ve never been taught where to go yet somehow inherit the instinct to seek specific waypoints.

Cracking these gene-driven impulses will provide a fuller picture of how more animals navigate, as well as help us assess if DNA-encoded intuition can withstand human changes like dams and light pollution.

And if we do get in the way, research can offer ideas for how to help critters get where they’re going.

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THE BIG BANG WASN’T A SOLITARY EXPLOSION THAT

ended in a minute: It was a long, simmering process that, over millennia, led to the birth of the universe as we know it. In the very first moments, astrophysicists suspect there was a period of hyper-rapid expansion—possibly faster than the speed of light. That began around 13.8 billion years ago, and ultimately created the cosmic soup that molded the stars, planets, and human existence.

After the initial burst, scientists think the universe was the size of a grapefruit—incredibly dense, hot, and energetic. Unexplained forces then caused it to swell more, and it eventually stretched into a fog of particles. If you were viewing this like a movie, you’d see light emerge about 380,000 years in; fast-forward a little, and you’d glimpse the birth of galaxies, forming and spiraling under the influence of gravity. Keep watching, and you’d notice the starry swirls moving farther and farther apart.

That’s because the universe we’ve studied—with all of space and time—is still growing. The big bang rages on.

WHERE WE WENT WRONG

HOW DID ALASKA GET CONSUMPTION?

BY

SARA

K I L EY WAT S O N

When you’ve been printing stories for 148 years, some bonkers ideas are going to creep into your pages. Here, we’re diving into the archives to debunk PopSci pieces that no longer qualify as “popular” or “science.”

I N T H E 1 9 T H C E N T U R Y,

tuberculosis killed thousands in remote Alaskan settlements.

Medical-journal author W.T. Wythe shared his hunch as to why in Popular Science’s May 1872 issue: “The diseases of the northwest coast are modified by, and in many cases owe their origin to, the peculiar topography of the place and its climate. Along the ocean, where the winds blow with great violence from the sea, disorders of the respiratory organs are most frequent.”

We now know that diseases are caused by microbes, but back then, it wasn’t so strange to think they sprang out of thin air. The belief had a name—miasma theory—and it stuck around to the late 1800s. Even “malaria” is Italian for “bad air.”

Wythe, however, didn’t stop at blaming Alaska’s weather in his

take: “Tuberculosis diseases are very common among both natives and whites, and occur most frequently among the half-breeds.”

It’s true that certain conditions have ethnic biases. For instance, most individuals with sickle cell anemia have sub-Saharan African heritage. Similarly, people with TaySachs are likelier to have Ashkenazi backgrounds. But both of these are genetic, while tuberculosis is infectious: It attacks anyone who’s close and has a weak immune system.

Wythe’s ignorance on bacteria and tribal lifestyles may have blinded him to the real root of the carnage, says Sally Carraher, a medical anthropologist at the University of Alaska at Anchorage.

When colonial ships crossed over to the Northern territory, the tuberculosis epidemic wasn’t far behind.

REDISCOVER

THE RETRO FUTURE Follow the Progress of Innovation Through 145 Years of Popular Science

For decades, Popular Science magazine has captured our imaginations with forecasts of the future. Reminisce over our greatest hits (and most hilarious misses) with 400+ wacky and fascinating covers—plus witty insight into how our best guesses panned out.

and check out the latest in science and tech at www.popsci.com

1919

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2015

22

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In October 2018, a rogue Chinese scientist reportedly used the editing tool CRISPR on the DNA of twin embryos to make them resistant to HIV. The following work of fiction imagines a future where parents could access the same technology and Build-a-Baby.

BECCA HAD GREEN EYES

and Charlie had brown, but their daughter was born with an exquisite blend of both. When Sam asked if they’d specially requested hazel, the couple was coy.

“We told the techs to let the embryo just do its thing,” Charlie said. “I figure we’d meddled enough, having sperm spun out of my skin’s stem cells so we wouldn’t need a donor. Of course, the clinic offered to let us make a few tweaks by introducing an engineered virus to edit her DNA, but—” “—but you know no one has ever managed to upsell me on anything,” Becca said with a snort. “Anyway, I knew we didn’t need it. She was bound to be a gorgeous kid.”

Sam mm-hmmed in agreement but thought to herself that maybe their fertility specialist had been a little too heavy-handed. Still, it was hard to argue with the results: Pictures of all those cherubic CRISPR kids made for damn good advertising when she and her partner, Dana, made their own visit to the clinic, a few months after Becca and Charlie announced their pregnancy.

“By signing here you’re giving us permission to fix any genetic anomalies we find in the course of creating your embryo,” the nurse explained at the appointment.

Dana nibbled her lip. “How do you define that though?”

“Oh, it’s all a bunch of technical jargon,” the nurse said.

“Obviously you don’t want us keeping a gene associated with high cancer risk?”

“I guess that’s reasonable,” Dana muttered, still scanning the dense document. “And what is it you were saying about the special offer?”

“Ah, yes,” the nurse said.

“With our standard package for same-sex parents, we’re throwing in two bonus boosters that swap in DNA with tested improvements. Our most popular enhancements are intelligence and beauty, but we have athletic and artistic options too.”

Sam could see her wife gearing up for a retort, so she grabbed her hand. “ Da n a ,” s h e p l e ad e d .

“Don’t you want to have a baby? Our perfect baby?”

“OK, but what if some of these supposed edits go wrong? What if we’re setting our great-grandchildren up for some catastrophic genetic plague?”

“All procedures come with a 20-year warranty for free repairs,” the nurse interjected.

“See?” Sam squeezed her hand. “They’ve got it covered.”

Besides, it was clear that everyone else was giving their embryos a head start.

She wouldn’t want their child to get left behind.

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BIG Q S SOUND BITES

W H AT

POSTCARD

MAKES A CITY LAST? AS TOLD TO POPSCI

LAWN COME FROM? BY

G R AC E WA D E

STA F F

SOME CITIES FORM BY ACCIDENT: INDUSTRIOUS people set up shop near water and tillable soil, build a modest financial hub that draws in a steady stream of citizens, and eventually end up with a nice little metropolis. But as times and economic models change, why wouldn’t an incidental burg disappear just as quickly? We asked three experts what the world’s most resilient communities have in common.

Serving a balance of functions makes a place more stable.

Cholula in central Mexico has been continually occupied since the first millennium BCE, in part because it had one of the ancient world’s most revered pyramids. It served as an important market as well as a site for spiritual pilgrimage.

Other Aztec cities—Teotihuacan and Tula, for example— rose and fell in the meantime because their overarching functions were solely political. Their fortunes were always tied to the dynasty or administration in charge.

—David M. Carballo, Associate Professor of Archaeology, Anthropology, and Latin American Studies at Boston University

Keeping residents safe is crucial, but so is fostering their growth as a community. Walled cities like Rome, Jerusalem, and Cartagena provided security, but they also had public spaces for interaction, recreation, and culture.

—Robin King, Director of Knowledge Capture and Collaboration at the Ross Center for Sustainable Cities

Looking back at American cities during the 1970s, you see a loss of social cohesion from neglecting the public realm —not just parks, but also sidewalks, trees, streetlights, benches. Little moments that make you feel welcome. The most resilient cities never forget the importance of this.

—Alissa Walker, Urbanism Editor at Curbed 24

WHERE DOES THE CLASSIC AMERICAN

S P R I N G 2 0 2 0 / P O P S C I.CO M

JUST 3 MILES OUTSIDE

Chicago lies Riverside, Illinois, a quiet 1,600-acre village that looks like a tidy Stepford suburb. Few people, however, know that it helped set the mold for many more ‘burbs to come.

In the 1860s, a group of local investors wanted to lure homebuyers to their l a n d , s o t h ey co m m i ssioned landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted to design the antidote for crowded urban life. He drew inspiration from his tours of England’s public gardens, and dotted his blueprints with large parks and green plazas. He also wanted to create natural spaces that residents could see and reach from their front doors. To do this, he sat all houses 30 feet back from the road, behind close-cut lawns and two well-spaced trees.

Decades later, Olmsted’s vision of one of America’s founding suburbs came to fruition. Riverside filled up with winding streets, a golf course, and grass-hemmed

homes. By the mid-1900s, almost every parcel had been developed.

The concept of a semiprivate patch where families could relax, romp, and reap the benefits of the outdoors, meanwhile, spread beyond the town’s borders.

The lawn is now a cornerstone of bedroom communities across the country, but it’s had some damning environmental impacts. US homeowners spend up to 50 gallons of water a day ensuring that their verdant carpets hold up to local ordinances and neighbors’ scrutiny. What’s more, runoff from fertilizers and pesticides contaminates water sources and kills off bedrock species in the food chain.

That’s led to a rival movement in recent years, where people replant their yards with overgrown shrubs and billowing sedges to foster real, thriving ecosystems.

The individuality might stray wildly from Olmsted’s prototype, but it still brings nature to Americans’ front steps.

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THE BIG Q

E’VE ALL FELT THAT JAB TO THE SOUL YOU

get from driving by your old high school haunts or hearing a tune you once danced to. But why is that bittersweet sort of reminiscence so universal?

Modern neuroscientists and psychologists know that a healthy dose of nostalgia is good for you, at least if you’re recalling happy days. But there was no sweetness to cut the bitter sensation in 1688, when Johannes Hofer coined the word in his medical dissertation. A combination of the Greek words nostos, or homecoming, and algos, or pain, it was a special type of homesickness associated with soldiers fighting far-off wars—and doctors feared it could kill.

Seventeenth-century physicians like Hofer worried such thoughts depleted a patient’s “vital spirits,” draining their energy and putting health at risk, says Susan J. Matt, a professor of history at Weber State University. In the 19th century, doctors debated whether nostalgia was a disease in its own right or something that exacerbated other conditions common among troops, like dysentery. Either way, they believed it could cause irregular heartbeat, fever, and, in rare cases, death.

Our opinion of nostalgia has evolved since then, but the phenomenon still eludes understanding. “It’s a very mixed emotion,” says Frederick Barrett, a cognitive neuroscientist at Johns Hopkins University. That makes it hard to shoehorn into existing psychological theory, which typically categorizes emotions as either positive or negative. And triggers— the cars, chords, or smells that blast you into the past—are extremely personal. When one person’s trash is another’s sentimental treasure, designing a standardized study is difficult.

But we do know nostalgia has a marked effect on us: Imaging studies show us that these experiences have their own neural signature. In 2016, Barrett reported that meaningful musical cues changed the activity of the substantia nigra, a reward processing center that makes the happy hormone dopamine. That same year, neuroscientists in Japan published their own study, which argues that the emotion is co-produced by the brain’s recall and reward systems. They found that nostalgic images tax the memory-managing hippocampus more than other sights, as people mine autobiographical details deep in the past. This mental effort pays off: As the hippocampus activates, so too does the ventral striatum, another of the brain’s dopaminergic reward centers.

That longing for the past might be a protective mechanism, says Tim Wildschut, a professor of social and personality psychology at the University of Southampton in England. Since 2001, he and his colleagues have generated a growing body of evidence that individuals more prone to nostalgia are generally more likely to socialize, feel empathy, and find life meaningful. But their work also suggests a more primitive purpose for the feeling: The same neurology that makes us long for people and places we’ve left behind may have evolved to remind

our ancient ancestors of pleasant physical sensations during periods of discomfort and pain. In a 2012 study in the journal Emotion, Wildschut’s team showed that lower temperatures make us more nostalgic, and that nostalgia makes us feel toasty even when we’re objectively colder—a bit of magical thinking that could help people persevere in situations that might otherwise feel hopeless. If remembering the warmth of the cave you last called home could trick you into feeling a little less freezing, you might just keep moving long enough to find shelter before your body starts to shut down.

In the modern era of sweaters and central heating, research suggests that the occasional look backward can also give us a life-affirming boost in more-subtle ways: by increasing selfesteem and protecting against depression. Clay Routledge, a social psychologist at North Dakota State University, conducted some of the earliest experimental studies on reminiscing as a mechanism for emotional self-regulation. “We’re in this campaign for some sort of meaning in life,” Routledge says. When you feel anxious or inconsequential, memories can be a source of comfort. “These cherished experiences we’ve accumulated across time make our lives seem meaningful,” he says. Feeling nostalgic helps us access them.

Sentimentality’s apparent power to jump-start one’s memory also seems to improve recall ability in people with Alzheimer’s and other forms of dementia. In 2011, Mary Mittelman, a researcher at New York University Langone Health’s department of psychiatry, founded the Unforgettables, a chorus for people with dementia in New York City.

When the ensemble performs familiar tunes—think classic songs like “Ol’ Man River”—participants, even some who struggle with regular speech, start to sing along. Some clinicians are trying to fold retro audio into formal dementia care, with curated playlists and personalized concerts put on by music therapists for patients and their families.

New flavors of this sort of “reminiscence therapy” are emerging around the world. In 2018, London-based startup Virtue Health launched the virtual reality app LookBack, which allows headset-wearing users to visit memorable locations around the world, or just take a walk on a familiar beach. That same year, the George G. Glenner Alzheimer’s Family Centers opened its first Town Square, an adult daycare facility designed to look like a small town in 1950s America. Though LookBack and Town Square have yet to publish peer-reviewed data on the success of their programs, clients say the projects have helped seniors access dusty memories and reconnect with loved ones.

Scientists need a lot more information to adequately characterize this complex and bittersweet human sentiment.

But while centuries of doctors considered nostalgia a deadly disease, we now know how wrong they were: Our longing for a lost time can help us make it through today.

BY ELEANOR CUMMINS

P O P S C I.CO M / S P R I N G 2 0 2 0

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N E X T T I M E YO U F I R E U P A

PlayStation or launch Fortnite, take a moment of reverence for the 1972 Atari classic, Pong. Those two digital paddles— more like moving line segments—and the dot bouncing between them kicked off the era of modern video gaming. Now, a version of that contest is back, in furniture form: The Pong Table is a 28-by-48-inch analog shrine to digital culture.

Rather than joysticking onscreen paddles, players spin oversize dials to move physical clackers under the glass.

Inside, a computer controls a series of motors and pulleys magnetically linked to the pieces on the surface. Choose a traditional two-person match, a contest against AI, or even watch the table battle itself. The digital scoreboard doubles as a clock when the game ends and the house champion reigns supreme.

P O P S C I.CO M / S P R I N G 2 0 2 0

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Grinder Cheap, blade-based machines chop your beans into inconsistent chunks, but the Baratza Virtuoso+ uses two carbon-steel burrs to crush them into a uniform powder, while extracting more oil for enhanced flavor. Choose from 40 levels of coarseness to match your brew.

Brewer The key to the Six-Cup Classic Chemex is its beaker-riffed design. Pour the water (heated to 204 degrees Fahrenheit) over your precious grounds, then watch them bubble up— or “bloom”—as they release CO2. The borosilicate glass won’t absorb aromas, so every batch tastes fresh.

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e For odd angles A brass cartridge inside the Fisher Space Pen contains both ink and pressurized nitrogen gas so NASA astronauts can write in space. Here on Earth, that same feature lets you jot notes while you’re upside down.

For color-coded lists f The plastic body of the Bic 4-Color Ballpoint houses four shafts, each one a different hue and deployed by its own lever. If this gadget feels like the stuff of childhood, that’s because it’s been around since 1970.

For a gift f Twist the upper portion of the 0.6-inch-wide Cross Classic Century to reveal its replaceable ballpoint tip. Its sleek and durable coated brass barrel will endure years of abuse in a

P O P S C I.CO M / S P R I N G 2 0 2 0

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1 Press the shutter button to expose the top film square in an eight-count pack. A photosensitive coating on the sheet’s bottom layer captures the image.

2 Rollers squeeze open a pod of chemicals and disperse them between the film’s two layers as it ejects, developing the negative version of the picture.

3 The resulting reaction activates dye on the negative and transports it to the clear surface on the top section of your print, producing the final image you see.

IN THE 1970S, POLAROID MADE INSTANT

HOW IT WORKS

prints charming 34

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BY

STA N H O R AC Z E K

photography irresistibly simple: Press one button to capture and print a cherished memory (or questionable decision). To this day, the Polaroid Originals company relies on the same dual-layer film, chemicals, and clever engineering as those early cameras did to develop each square. This is how shots come about—no shaking necessary.

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JO H N K E N N E DY

1 Cook The Weber Original Premium 22-inch charcoal grill hasn’t changed much since 1952, save for a few modern improvements. The biggest: An aluminum basin below the kettle captures ash, allowing you to dispose of it and keep the upper section tidy.

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2 Avoid burns Even seasoned hands can’t handle the heat coming off hot briquettes. Kevlar-stitched leather Kim Yuan gloves will protect your paws from temperatures in excess of 650 degrees. But at just 1.2 millimeters thick, the garments still let you retain dexterity.

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4 Track temperatures Stick one of the ThermoWorks Smoke’s probes in the food, and attach the other to the grate to measure the air. Monitor your cooking with the wireless receiver, which works from up to 300 feet away. Alarms alert you when dinner is ready to serve.

5 Clean Brushes lose their bristles as they wear down, and those dangerous metal bits could end up in your grub. But the Yukon Glory premium scraper has no wires to shed; the simple oak paddle will conform to your grate with each push as you scour.

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1 American chestnut Carpenters once used this hardwood for everything from construction to furniture.

That changed in the early 1900s, when a fungus decimated the native population—but you can still find choice boards that have been reclaimed from old buildings or fallen trees.

38

2 Black cherry Cabinetmakers prize black cherry as one of the finest all-around materials for the job because of its durability and innate beauty. It starts off as a light pinkish color and darkens to a deep reddish-brown over time. Many craftspeople finish it with a simple layer of clear coat.

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3 Tigerwood The strength of this strikingly striped lumber makes it great for decking and other outdoor applications. It’s naturally resistant to rot, so you don’t have to stain it for protection, although you can oil it once a year to prevent it from fading to a lackluster gray or silver color.

JO H N K E N N E DY

4 Snakewood Named for its visual similarity to a serpent’s skin, this rare South American timber is one of the hardest and most expensive in the world. Despite its density, it splinters easily, so carpenters generally use it for small specialty products like violin bows.

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the electric ride

1890s William Morrison’s ride Scotland-native William Morrison was one of the first inventors to create an electric vehicle for America’s streets.

Twenty-four batteries under the seats provided the carriage with just 4 horsepower and a top speed of 20 mph as it rolled on steel-clad wooden wheels.

1914 Detroit Electric 47 The model 47, made by the Anderson Electric Car Company, could start instantly without the hand-cranking its combustion-driven cousins required. Thomas Edison piloted one of these, as did Henry Ford’s wife. The car promised a respectable 80 miles of range per charge.

1996 GM EV1 General Motors envisioned its EV1 as a regular commuter car, and not just a niche option. To offset the heft of its lead-acid power units, the automaker constructed it with plastic body panels and an aluminum frame. GM made only about 1,100, which customers had to lease.

1970s The Sebring-Vanguard The cheese-blockshaped two-seater held the title of most produced electric vehicle in American history for four decades. It housed eight 6-volt golf-cart batteries, but with its lightweight frame, it could run for some 35 miles after one serving of electrons from the grid.

1967 Ford Comuta The first gas-free Mustang may have debuted in 2019, but Ford’s earlier EV was cuter: a 7-foot-long conveyance that could reach a maximum speed of 40 mph, travel for 40 miles per charge, and seat a family of four (snugly). Power came from four 12-volt lead-acid packs.

2008 Tesla Roadster This sleek two-seater kicked off the era of lithium-ion power. The 6,831 cells weighed some 700 pounds but helped push the ride from zero to 60 in four seconds and gifted it with a range of 245 miles. To keep those elements cool, an antifreeze-like solution flowed around them.

2010 Nissan Leaf For a quarter the price of the Roadster, the Leaf promised 100 miles from its 192 lithium-ion cells.

Nissan styled it to look more like a regular car and less like other green options on the market. Its bulging headlamps managed airflow, limiting wind noise in the absence of engine sounds.

2018 Rivian R1T and R1S This pickup and SUV (not shown) both use the same modular, skateboard-like chassis; it holds the vehicles’ four motors, shielded batteries, and powermanagement system.

The configuration allows the freedom to include features such as a mobile kitchen, for camping.

BATTERY-POWERED WHIPS MIGHT SEEM LIKE NOVEL ADDITIONS TO YOUR LOCAL THOROUGHFARES, BUT THEY’VE ACTUALLY BEEN AROUND FOR MORE THAN A CENTURY. THIS IS HOW THE CARS HAVE PROGRESSED, FROM BUGGY TO PICKUP. BY

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kickstarters NIKE’S AIR JORDANS BOAST LEGENDARY STYLE, BUT THE SNEAKERS HAVE ALSO FUNCTIONED AS LACED-UP LABS THAT DELIVER NEW TECH TO THE COURTS. HERE’S HOW FAR THEY’VE COME. BY

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Leading Ingredient For Acid Reflux Bouts Linked To Anti-Aging Phenomenon Scientific studies show breakthrough acid reflux treatment also helps maintain vital health and helps protect users from the serious conditions that accompany aging such as fatigue and poor cardiovascular health

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THESE STATEMENTS HAVE NOT BEEN EVALUATED BY THE FOOD AND DRUG ADMINISTRATION. THIS PRODUCT IS NOT INTENDED TO DIAGNOSE, TREAT, CURE, OR PREVENT ANY DISEASE. ALL DOCTORS MENTIONED ARE REMUNERATED FOR THEIR SERVICES. ALL CLINICAL STUDIES ON ALOECURE’S ACTIVE INGREDIENT WERE INDEPENDENTLY CONDUCTED AND WERE NOT SPONSORED BY THE AMERICAN GLOBAL HEALTH GROUP.

ORIGINS SPRING 2020

PHOTOGRAPH BY

THE VOOR HE S

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AN ANCIENT MICROBIAL MYSTERY

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SHOULD RIVERS FLOW FREE ONCE AGAIN?

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THE WORLD MAPPED, INSTANTLY

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DESIGNING DINOS WITH FOSSIL CLUES

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FLAWLESS FROM THE START

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AGE-OLD CLIMATE SOLUTIONS

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WHEN A NEW RAIL AND OLD RUINS COLLIDE

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YOUR DOG WAS THE ALPHA FIRST 45

POPSCI.COM

In Search of the Missing Microbe

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SPRING 2020

Most Mongolians are lactose intolerant, and yet their diet relies on dairy. A mysterious world of bacteria could be at play.

By Andrew Curry

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POPSCI.COM

Lake Khövsgöl is about as far north of the Mongolian capital of Ulaanbaatar as you can get without leaving the country. If you’re too impatient for the 13-hour bus ride, you can take a prop plane to the town of Murun, then drive for three hours on dirt roads to Khatgal, a tiny village nestled against the lake’s southern shore. The felt yurts that dot the surrounding green plains are a throwback to the days—not so long ago—when most Mongolians lived as subsistence herders.

In July 2017, archaeogeneticist Christina Warinner headed there to learn about the population’s complex relationship with milk. In Khatgal, she found a cooperative called Blessed by Yak, where families within a few hours’ drive pooled the bounty from their cows, goats, sheep, and yaks to supply tourists with heirloom dairy products.

Warinner watched for hours as Blessed by Yak

PAGE 48

members transformed the liquid into a dizzying array of foods. Milk was everywhere in and around these homes: splashing from swollen udders into wooden buckets, simmering in steel woks atop fires fueled by cow dung, hanging in leather bags from riblike wooden rafters, bubbling in specially made stills, crusting as spatters on the wood-lattice inner walls. The women even washed their hands in whey. “Working with herders is a five-senses experience,” Warinner says. “The taste is really strong; the smell is really strong. It reminds me of when I was nursing my daughter, and everything smelled of milk.”

Each family she visited had a half-dozen dairy products or more in some stage of production around a central hearth. And horse herders who came to sell their goods brought barrels of airag, a slightly alcoholic fizzy beverage that set the yurts abuzz.

Airag, made only from horse milk, is not to be confused with aaruul, a sour cheese, created from curdled milk, that gets so hard after weeks drying in the sun that you’re better off sucking on it or softening it in tea than risking your teeth trying to chew it. Easier to consume is byaslag, rounds of white cheese pressed between wooden boards.

Roasted curds called eezgi look a little like burnt popcorn; dry, they last for months stored in cloth bags. Carefully packed in a sheep-stomach wrapper, the buttery clotted cream known as urum—made from fat-rich yak or sheep milk—will warm bellies all through the winter, when temperatures regularly drop well below zero.

Warinner’s personal favorite? The “mash” left behind when turning cow or yak milk into an alcoholic drink called shimin arkhi.

“At the bottom of the still, you have an oily yogurt that’s delicious,” she says.

Her long trip to Khatgal wasn’t about culinary curiosity, however. Warinner was there to solve a mystery: Despite the dairy diversity she saw, an estimated 95 percent of Mongolians are, genetically speaking, lactose

SPRING 2020

IN SEARCH OF THE MISSING MICROBE

intolerant. Yet, in the frost-free summer months, she believes they may be getting up to half their calories from milk products.

Scientists once thought dairying and the ability to drink milk went hand in hand.

What she found in Mongolia has pushed Warinner to posit a new explanation. On her visit to Khatgal, she says, the answer was all around her, even if she couldn’t see it.

Sitting, transfixed, in homes made from wool, leather, and wood, she was struck by the contrast with the plastic and steel kitchens she was familiar with in the US and Europe. Mongolians are surrounded by microscopic organisms: the bacteria that ferment the milk into their assorted foodstuffs, the microbes in their guts and on the dairy-soaked felt of their yurts. The way these invisible Mongolians creatures interact with subsist on a dairy-heavy diet, each other, with the environment, and with even though our bodies creates a most are lactose intolerant. dynamic ecosystem.

That’s not unique. Everyone lives with a billionsstrong universe of microbes in, on, and around them. Several pounds’ worth thrive in our guts alone. Researchers have dubbed this wee world the microbiome and are just beginning to understand the role it plays in our health.

Some of these colonies, though, are more diverse than others: Warinner is still working on sampling the Khatgal herders’ microbiomes, but another team has already gathered evidence that the Mongolian bacterial makeup differs from those found in more-industrial areas of the world.

Charting the ecosystem they are a part of might someday help explain why the population is able to eat so much dairy—and offer clues to help people everywhere who are lactose intolerant.

Warinner argues that a better understanding of the complex microbial universe inhabiting every Mongolian yurt could also provide insight into a problem that goes far beyond helping folks eat more brie. As communities around the world abandon traditional lifestyles, so-called diseases of civilization, like dementia, diabetes, and food intolerances, are on the rise.

Warinner is convinced that the Mongolian affinity

MATTHÄUS REST

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POPSCI.COM

for dairy is made possible by a mastery of bacteria 3,000 years or more in the making. By scraping gunk off the teeth of steppe dwellers who died thousands of years ago, she’s been able to prove that milk has held a prominent place in the Mongolian diet for millennia. Understanding the differences between traditional microbiomes like theirs and those prevalent in the industrialized world could help explain the illnesses that accompany modern lifestyles— and perhaps be the beginning of a different, more beneficial approach to diet and health.

Nowadays, Warinner does her detective work at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History’s ancient DNA lab, situated on the second floor of a high-rise bioscience facility overlooking the historic center of the medieval town of Jena, Germany. To prevent any errant DNA from contaminating its samples, entering the lab involves a half-hour protocol, including disinfection of foreign objects, and putting on head-to-toe Tyvek jumpsuits, surgical face masks, and eye shields. Inside, postdocs and technicians wielding drills and picks harvest fragments of dental plaque from the teeth of people who died long ago. It’s here that many of Warinner’s Mongolian specimens get cataloged, analyzed, and archived.

Her path to the lab began in 2010, when she was a postdoctoral researcher in Switzerland. Warinner was looking for ways to find evidence of infectious disease on centuries-old skeletons. She started with dental caries, or cavities—spots where bacteria had burrowed into the tooth enamel. To get a good look, she spent a lot of time clearing away plaque: mineral deposits scientists call “calculus,” and that, in the absence of modern dentistry, accumulate on teeth in an unsightly brown mass.

Around the same time, Amanda Henry, now a researcher at the University of Leiden in the Netherlands, put calculus scraped from Neanderthal teeth under the microscope and spotted starch grains trapped in the mineral layers. The results provided

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evidence that the population ate a diverse diet that included plants as well as meat.

Hearing about the work, Warinner wondered if looking at specimens from a medieval German cemetery might yield similar insights. But when she checked for food remains under the microscope, masses of perfectly preserved bacteria blocked her from doing so. “They were literally in your way, obscuring your view,” she recalls. The samples were teeming with microbial and human genes, preserved and protected by a hard mineral matrix.

Warinner had discovered a way to see the tiny organisms in the archaeological record, and with them, a means to study diet. “I realized this was a really rich source of bacterial DNA no one had thought of before,” Warinner says. “It’s a time capsule that gives us access to information about an individual’s life that is very hard to get from other places.”

The dental calculus research dovetailed with rising interest in the microbiome, rocketing Warinner to a coveted position at Max Planck. (In 2019, Harvard hired her as an anthropology professor, and she now splits her time between Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Jena, overseeing labs on two continents.) Her TED talks have racked up more than 2 million views. “I never expected to have an entire career based on something people spend lots of time and money trying to get rid of,” she quips.

That grimy dental buildup, Warinner has learned, preserves more than just DNA. In 2014, she published a study in which she and her colleagues looked at the teeth of Norse Greenlanders, seeking insight into why Vikings abandoned their settlements there after just a few hundred years.

She found milk proteins suspended in the plaque of the area’s earliest settlers—and almost none in that of people buried five centuries later. “We had a marker to trace dairy consumption,” Warinner says.

This discovery led Warinner to turn to one of the biggest puzzles in recent human

evolution: Why milk? Most people in the world aren’t genetically equipped to digest dairy as adults. A minority of them— including most northern Europeans—have one of several mutations that allows their bodies to break down the key sugar in milk, lactose, beyond early childhood. That ability is called lactase persistence, after the protein that processes lactose.

Until recently, geneticists thought that dairying and the ability to drink milk must have evolved together, but that didn’t prove out when investigators went looking for evidence. Ancient DNA samples from all across Europe suggest that even in places where lactase persistence is common today, it didn’t appear until 3000 BCE—long after people domesticated cattle and sheep and started consuming dairy products. For 4,000 years prior to the mutation, Europeans were making cheese and eating dairy despite their lactose intolerance. Warinner guessed that microbes may have been doing the job of dairy digestion for them.

To prove it, she began looking for places where the situation was similar. Mongolia made sense: There’s evidence that herding and domestication there dates back 5,000 years or more. But, Warinner says, direct evidence of long-ago dairy consumption was absent—until ancient calculus let her harvest it straight from the mouths of the dead.

Starting in 2016, in her Jena lab, Warinner and her team scraped the teeth of skeletons buried on the steppes thousands of years ago and excavated by archaeologists in the 1990s. Samples about the size of a lentil were enough to reveal proteins from cow, goat, and sheep milk. By tapping the same remains for ancient DNA, Warinner could

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“I never expected to have a career based on something people spend lots of money trying to get rid of.”

SPRING 2020

—CHRISTINA WARINNER

go one step further and show that they belonged to people who lacked the gene to digest lactose—just like modern Mongolians do.

Samples of the microbiome from in and around today’s herders, Warinner realized, might offer a way to understand how this was possible. Though it’s estimated that just 1 in 20 Mongolians has the mutation allowing them to digest milk, few places in the world put as much emphasis on dairy. They include it in festivities and offer it to spirits before any big trip to ensure safety and success. Even their metaphors are dairy-based: “The smell from a wooden vessel filled with milk never goes away” is the rough equivalent of “old habits die hard.”

Down the hall from the ancient DNA lab, thousands of microbiome samples the team has collected over the past two summers pack tall industrial freezers. Chilled to minus 40 degrees F—colder, even, than the Mongolian winter—the collection includes everything from eezgi and byaslag to goat turds and yak-udder swabs. Hundreds of the playing-card-size plastic baggies new mothers use to freeze breast milk contain raw, freshly squeezed camel, cow, goat, reindeer, sheep, and yak milk.

Warinner’s initial hypothesis was that the Mongolian herders—past and present—were using lactose-eating microbes to break down their many varieties of dairy, making it digestible. Commonly known as fermentation, it’s the same bacteriaassisted process that turns malt into beer, grapes into wine, and flour into bubbly sourdough.

Fermentation is integral to just about every dairy product in the Mongolian repertoire. While Western cheeses also utilize the process, makers of Parmesan, brie, and Camembert all rely on fungi and

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Warinner’s project now has a new name, Dairy Cultures, reflecting her growing realization that Mongolia’s microbial toolkit might not come down to a few specific bacteria.

“Science is often very reductive,” she says.

“People tend to look at just one aspect of things. But if we want to understand dairying, we can’t just look at the animals, or the microbiome, or the products. We have to look at the entire system.”

The results could help explain another phenomenon, one that affects people far from the Mongolian steppes. The billions

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COURTESY CHRISTINA WARINNER

rennet—an enzyme from the stomachs of calves—to get the right texture and taste. Mongolians, on the other hand, maintain microbial cultures called starters, saving a little from each batch to inoculate the next.

Ethnographic evidence suggests that these preparations have been around a very, very long time. In Mongolian, they’re called khöröngö, a word that’s derived from the term for wealth or inheritance. They are living heirlooms, typically passed from mother to daughter. And they require regular care and feeding. “Starter cultures get constant attention over weeks, months, years, generations,” says Björn Reichhardt, a Mongolian-speaking ethnographer at Max Planck and member of Warinner’s team responsible for collecting most of the samples in the Jena freezers. “Mongolians tend to dairy products the way they would an infant.” As with a child, the environment in which they’re nurtured is deeply influential. The microbial makeup of each family’s starters seems to be subtly different.

After returning from Khatgal in 2017, Warinner launched the Heirloom Microbe project to identify and catalog the bacteria the herders were using to make their dairy products. The name reflected her hope that the yurts harbored strains or species ignored by industrial labs and corporate starter-culture manufacturers. Perhaps, Warinner

Ancient plaque shows Mongolians have eaten dairy for millennia.

imagined, there would be a novel strain or some combination of microbes Mongolians were using to process milk in a way that Western science had missed.

So far, she’s found Enterococcus, a bacterium common in the human gut that excels at digesting lactose but was eliminated from US and European dairy commodities decades ago. And they’ve spotted some new strains of familiar bacteria like Lactobacillus. But they haven’t identified any radically different species or starters—no magic microbes ready to package in pill form. “It doesn’t seem like there is a range of superbugs in there,” says Max Planck anthropologist Matthäus Rest, who works with Warinner on dairy research.

The reality might be more daunting.

Rather than a previously undiscovered strain of microbes, it might be a complex web of organisms and practices—the lovingly maintained starters, the milk-soaked felt of the yurts, the gut flora of individual herders, the way they stir their barrels of airag— that makes the Mongolian love affair with so many dairy products possible.

SPRING 2020

IN SEARCH OF THE MISSING MICROBE

of bacteria that make up our microbiomes aren’t passive passengers. They play an active—if little understood—role in our health, helping regulate our immune systems and digest our food.

Over the past two centuries, industrialization, sterilization, and antibiotics have dramatically changed these invisible ecosystems. Underneath a superficial diversity of flavors—mall staples like sushi, pad thai, and pizza—food is becoming more and more the same. Large-scale dairies even ferment items like yogurt and cheese using lab-grown starter cultures, a $1.2 billion industry dominated by a handful of industrial producers. People eating commoditized cuisine lack an estimated 30 percent of the gut microbe species that are found in remote groups still eating “traditional” diets. In 2015, Warinner was part of a team that found bacteria in the digestive tracts of huntergatherers living in the Amazon jungle that have all but vanished in people consuming a selection of typical Western fare.

“People have the feeling that they eat a much more diverse and global diet than their parents, and that might be true,” Rest says, “but when you look at these foods on a microbial level, they’re increasingly empty.”

A review paper in Science in October 2019 gathered data from labs around the world beginning to probe if this dwindling variety might be making us sick. Dementia, diabetes, heart disease, stroke, and certain cancers are sometimes termed diseases of civilization.

They’re all associated with the spread of urban lifestyles and diets, processed meals, and antibiotics. Meanwhile, food intolerances and intestinal illnesses like Crohn’s disease and irritable bowel disease are on the rise.

Comparing the microbiome of Mongolian herders to samples from people consuming a more industrialized diet elsewhere in the world could translate into valuable insights into what we’ve lost—and how to get it back. Identifying the missing species

could refine human microbiome therapies and add a needed dose of science to probiotics.

There might not be much time left for this quest.

Over the past 50 years, hundreds of thousands of Mongolian herders have abandoned the steppes, their herds, and their traditional lifestyle, flocking to Ulaanbaatar. Around 50 percent of the country’s population, an estimated 1.5 million people, now crowds into the capital.

In summer 2020, Warinner’s team will return to Khatgal and other rural regions to collect mouth swabs and fecal specimens from herders, the last phase in cataloging the traditional Mongolian microbiome. She recently decided she’ll sample residents of Ulaanbaatar too, to see how urban dwelling is altering their bacterial balances as they adopt new foods, new ways of life, and, in all likelihood, newly simplified communities of microbes.

Something important, if invisible, is being lost, Warinner believes. On a recent fall morning, she was sitting in her sunlit office in the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnography on Harvard’s campus. Mostly unpacked from her latest trans-Atlantic move, she was contemplating a creeping, yurt-by-yurt extinction event.

It’s a conundrum vastly different in size, but not in scale, from those facing wildlife conservationists the world over. “How do you restore an entire ecology?” she wondered. “I’m not sure you can. We’re doing our best to record, catalog, and document as much as we can, and try to figure it out at the same time.”

Preserving Mongolia’s microbes, in other words, won’t be enough. We also need the traditional knowledge and everyday practices that have sustained them for centuries. Downstairs, display cases hold the artifacts of other peoples—from the Massachusett tribe that once lived on the land where Harvard now stands to the Aztec and Inca civilizations that used to rule vast stretches of Central and South America—whose traditions are gone forever, along with the microbial networks they nurtured. “Dairy systems are alive,” Warinner says. “They’ve been alive, and continuously cultivated, for 5,000 years. You have to grow them every single day. How much change can the system tolerate before it begins to break?”

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RUN DAMS FUELED AMERICA’S GROWTH BY CHOKING I TS R I V E R S . IS I T T IM E TO RESTORE NATURE’S INFRASTRUCTURE?

BY K AT E MO RGA N PHOTOGRAPHS BY B RI A N K LU TC H

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OPENING SPREAD: GREG VAUGHN/ALAMY; DANITA DELIMONT/ALAMY

unhurriedly past the viewing window in Lower Granite Dam, Theresa Wilson glances up from her knitting. “Chinook,� she says, tapping her computer keyboard once to record its passage. The salmon pauses as if to be admired. Its mottled scales flash as it moves against the current of the Snake River. Then it darts away, bound upstream to the place where it was born.

Salmon and trout are anadromous: They hatch in rivers, spend their lives at sea, then return to their birthplaces to reproduce and die. Here on the Snake in eastern Washington, that means traversing four hydroelectric dams, an arduous undertaking few complete.

The Lower Granite is the last barrier between this chinook and its spawning grounds. It is one of 13 salmon and trout species in the Pacific Northwest that the federal government lists as threatened or endangered. The concrete and steel structure in its way stands 151 feet tall and spans a gorge, its turbines sending froth churning downstream. Clearing the wall requires that a swimmer ascend a spiral structure called a fish ladder to a resting pool, where a viewing portal lets Wilson keep track of them for University of Washington biologists and others monitoring the impact dams have on piscine populations.

According to legend, the Snake brimmed with so many fish when the explorers Lewis and Clark arrived in 1805 that one could walk from bank to bank on their backs. Today the animals pass so rarely that Wilson spends much of her eight-hour shift making socks.

As recently as the middle of the 20th century, nearly 130,000 adult chinook returned to these waters in a single year. Around 10,000 made the journey in 2017, a dip that threatens the health of the river and all it sustains. More

to orcas in the Pacific—rely on salmon for food. Even plants and trees benefit, drawing nutrients from their waste and remains.

Across the nation, the scenario repeats.

Atlantic sturgeon, once a hallmark of the eastern seaboard, can reach only about half of their historic spawning grounds.

Some 40 percent of the 800 or so varieties of freshwater fish in the US, and more than two-thirds of native mussels, are rare or endangered, in part because man-made barriers have altered their ecosystems. Reservoirs disrupt currents, altering water’s velocity and temperature. That can harm its quality and interrupt the reproductive cycles of aquatic creatures. Stanching a river stops the distribution of sediment and the formation of logjams, two things critical to creating healthy habitat. It also eliminates floodplains and natural meanders, both of which prevent the banks from overflowing.

America was shaped by its rivers—more than 250,000 in all—and since Colonial times we have bent them to our will. The Army Corps of Engineers, which oversees dams owned by the federal government, lists more than 90,000 in its national inventory. Tens of thousands more remain unregistered.

“Think about that number,” then-Secretary of the Interior Bruce Babbitt told a meeting of the Ecological Society of America in 1998. “That means we have been building, on average, one large dam a day, every single day, since the Declaration of Independence.”

The best of them generate power, facilitate navigation, and slake our thirst. But many, perhaps the majority, are no longer essential.

The falling cost of renewable energy and

Elwha River 50 miles west of Seattle a model. Salmon and trout had all but vanished before the National Park Service breached two dams there in 2014, reviving the waterway and surrounding wilderness with little effect on power supplies. Restoration champions believe the same will happen on the Snake, where they’ve waged a decades-long fight against the Corps, regional politicians, and farmers who argue that the hydroelectric power it generates remains essential and that knocking the system down might not save the animals.

As pressure mounts to “free the Snake,” the Corps and others are considering similar projects nationwide, a trend that could reshape what Duke University hydrologist Martin Doyle calls “our riverine republic.”

“We’re shifting our priorities, and we’re left with this relic landscape that’s no longer applicable,” he says. “Where that legacy infrastructure gets in the way or causes problems, let’s undo it. The future of 80 percent of dams is very questionable, or should be.” continued decline of manufacturing renders many of these structures unnecessary. Others require expensive maintenance. Seven in 10 are more than 50 years old and many are falling into disrepair, according to the American Society of Civil Engineers, which pegs the cost of upgrading the 17 percent it deems a “high hazard” (meaning a failure could kill people downstream) at $45 billion.

Overhauling the rest will cost many times that. In response, a growing number of scientists and environmentalists have called for razing dams that are obsolete or dispensable and letting more rivers—nature’s original infrastructure—once again run free.

Many of those advocates consider the

its headwaters in Yellowstone National Park through Idaho (where it remains one of the most unspoiled aquatic habitats in the West) and into Washington. There, it wends another 141 miles across a region called the Palouse—5 million acres of otherworldly P O P S C I.CO M / S P R I N G 2 0 2 0

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RUN WILD, RUN FREE

GEORGE OSTERTAG/ALAMY; KEVIN SCHAFER/ALAMY

dunes and golden wheat fields—before joining the mighty Columbia River.

Bryan Jones grew up here, near a town called Dusty, on land his great-grandfather settled a century-and-a-half ago. The family has always grown wheat, and their farm now covers 640 acres. In a good year, Jones will harvest 18,000 bushels. Washington is the country’s fourth-largest producer of the crop, which we mostly export.

The Army Corps of Engineers built four hydroelectric dams here on the lower Snake River between 1961 and 1975, deepening and widening the channel to accommodate barges headed to Portland, Oregon. “I think we were sold the promise of this new way to ship our grain, and we thought that was a good thing,” Jones says. For years, boats provided a cheaper alternative to trucks and trains. But the locks at Ice Harbor, Lower Monumental, Little Goose, and Lower Granite dams weren’t the boon many expected, and barging declined as costs rose. Today, less than 3 million tons head downriver each year, a decrease of 26 percent from the industry’s heyday in 2000.

Jones is the rare farmer who favors razing the structures. He can make an economic argument—he believes transport over land makes more financial sense—but at the heart of his opinion lies something simpler: He misses the landscape of his childhood.

“All up and down the Snake River there were sandy beaches, and orchards in the riparian area,” he says. “There were tomatoes, beets, beans. There were melons, alfalfa fields.”

He also recalls the abundant wildlife. Much of it is gone now, flooded by the reservoirs between the dams, he says.

So too are most of the fish. All four salmon and steelhead species found in the Snake are classified as threatened or endangered—a trend seen throughout the Pacific Northwest, where the US government manages 31 dams.

Their decline prompted President Jimmy Carter to sign a law in 1980 authorizing Idaho, Montana, Oregon, and Washington to develop a plan for saving them. The Bonneville Power Administration, a federal nonprofit that sells electricity generated by the dams, has spent an average of $220 million per year on habitat restoration and hatcheries since 2007. It has also given an average of $77 million annually to the Corps and other agencies, helping finance what Corps spokesman Joe Saxon calls “the world’s most advanced fish passage

“THE FUTURE OF 80 PERCENT OF D A M S I S V E RY QUESTIONABLE, O R S H O U L D B E .”

— H Y D R O LO G I ST M A RT I N D OY L E

systems.” Spillway weirs and ladders, both of which resemble water-park slides, help guide the animals over each dam. Workers pump small juveniles, called smolts, out of collection pools and into trucks and barges that carry them downriver. Cooling systems maintain reservoir temperatures to protect the creatures. Saxon says more than 99 percent of adults and 95 to 100 percent of youngsters survive the trip past the structures.

But those numbers reveal only part of the picture. Critics often characterize such claims as “akin to dropping a goldfish from a 100-floor skyscraper, seeing it is still alive at floor 75, and concluding it’s OK,” says Helen Neville, head scientist at the advocacy organization Trout Unlimited. Dams and reservoirs tax migratory fish by altering their route to and from the sea. This is especially hazardous for smolts. Rather than riding a swift, cold current downstream, they spend time and energy navigating the warmer, slower water of a reservoir, where they face greater odds of becoming something’s dinner. Should they escape unscathed, a 2014 study by the US Fish and Wildlife Service found that reaching the ocean takes youngsters an average of two weeks longer than it did before the dams went up. The same analysis shows the added stress kills nearly 1 in 4 migrating fish. Those that live to see the Pacific face threats there too, of course. All told, in recent years, fewer than 1 percent of juveniles that made it to the ocean have returned upstream to spawn. Before the Corps built all that hydroelectric infrastructure, the rate was 6 percent; biologists consider 2 percent sufficient to maintain a sustainable population. “They are truly straddling extinction,” Neville says.

That prompted 55 scientists from throughout the US to sign a letter in October 2019 calling for the demolition of the structures.

They base their plea on five federal court rulings since 1994 directing dam and waterway managers to consider additional measures to protect the wildlife and take a closer look at removal. (The Fish Passage Center, funded

by Bonneville Power to monitor piscine populations, has said breaching could quadruple the number of salmon returning to spawn.) The agencies involved must complete a court-ordered environmental-impact study—the latest of many—in 2020, but it probably won’t end the debate. Many farmers, fearing a rail monopoly, don’t want to lose the barges, and some regional politicians join the Corps in arguing against doing away with an energy source that, running at P O P S C I.CO M / S P R I N G 2 0 2 0

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full-tilt, could power a city the size of Seattle.

Currently, though, the dams provide just 4.3 percent of the region’s power.

Dismantling the structures might be 24 turbines in the lower Snake system has exceeded its 50-year life span. The Corps signed a $115 million contract in 2016 to install three at Ice Harbor Dam. Meanwhile, 30 percent since 2008, making Bonneville

Energy Coalition, an alliance of 100 public

needed infrastructure would add just $2 to customers’ monthly utility bills.

Simpson of Idaho called for a serious look at it, and Washington Gov. Jay Inslee signed legislation allocating $750,000 to study how

who favor breaching the barriers agree that unleashing the river will cool the water, create more spawning habitat, and give the imperiled creatures better odds of survival.

And that, they say, can only help the Snake overall. “I hope those dams come down,” Jones says. “I’d love to see it in my lifetime.

Every species that can get to the river and catch a fish is going to thrive.”

Ginger, stands at the edge of the Elwha River in western Washington, whining softly. He holds her back from a pool where hundreds, perhaps thousands, of tiny salmon fry shimmer in the sunlight. They

are just a few months old, and before long, they will begin their journey to the sea.

McHenry releases the dog, and she bounds into the water. The wee fish scatter.

McHenry has spent more than three decades as a biologist and habitat manager with the Lower Elwha Klallam Tribe. Their ancestral land has been radically reshaped since the removal of two hydroelectric dams allowed the river to run unfettered for the first time in more than a century.

The waterway begins in a snowfield high in the Olympic Mountains and flows 45 miles north to the Strait of Juan de Fuca. For millennia, the river ran thick with salmon and trout. As many as 400,000 adult chinook, coho, and other species returned annually to spawn, making it one of the richest anadromous fish habitats in the nation.

That changed in 1910, when the Olympic Power Company erected the Elwha Dam to power timber and pulp mills in nearby Port Angeles. In 1927, it built another, called Glines Canyon, 8 miles upstream of the first.

Beyond flooding Klallam religious sites and a verdant floodplain, the structures, which lacked fish passages, reduced spawning grounds to the river’s first 5 miles. Salmon populations plummeted in response. During the 20th century’s waning years, the system produced a negligible amount of electricity— about half the energy requirements of a single local mill—and its owners had decided that making it more fish-friendly was too expensive. In 1992, President George H.W. Bush signed a bill authorizing the Interior Department to buy the dams for $29.5 million, tear them down, and restore the habitat.

The National Park Service spent almost two decades planning the $350 million project. The biggest challenge was managing the immense amount of sediment: Some 33 million tons of silt, gravel, and rock littered the two reservoirs. A free-flowing river moves a lot of earth; letting it all go at once would wreak havoc downstream.

Work started in 2008 with construction of a treatment plant to filter the Port Angeles water supply. Beginning in 2011, crews partially drained the lakes and slowly emptied them by dismantling the barriers in 10- to 20-foot sections using a crane and a bargemounted excavator. The final chunks of concrete and steel fell in 2014.

That done, the Park Service worked with the tribe on the agency’s second-largest

habitat-restoration project ever. Biologists, botanists, and volunteers planted tens of thousands of indigenous trees, grasses, and other plants on floodplains denuded by the reservoirs. Salmon and trout ventured upstream within months. Still, officials augmented their meager numbers with animals raised in hatcheries. Although the water remained cloudy for more than two years, the dirt and gravel eventually settled, creating sandbars, beaches, and a vast estuary at the river’s mouth near Port Angeles.

Researchers snorkeling the length of the Elwha in 2018 counted 15,000 steelhead

shellfish, beavers, shorebirds, and other creatures. None of the computer models the federal government ran before the project predicted this. “About 3.5 million cubic yards of sediment were plopped here,” McHenry says, “and now we have an estuary ecosystem where there wasn’t one before.”

Not only can young fish make the transition from fresh to salt water, the estuary attracted enough Dungeness crab to support a robust fishery. Just (CONTINUED ON P. 118)

and logjams—some created by the river,

pings among the alder trees, and a salmon carcass hauled ashore by a predator. this riparian zone. Restoring the habitat, McHenry says, did more than save the fish.

It also created a natural defense against flooding, opened the river to greater recreational opportunities (federal and tribal officials will consider allowing salmon fishing in 2021), and resurrected woodlands and shorefront. “Damming a river’s about the most egregious thing you can do if you want to mess it up,” he says. “You can argue there are services you get out of that. But at least in this part of the world, and, I guess, in my value system, I think the services a wild river offers way exceed damming it.”

shoreline. Today the free-running river has ted with shrubs that provides habitat for P O P S C I.CO M / S P R I N G 2 0 2 0

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A WORLD

The birth of a new trend puts everyday people in control of the data that maps our planet.

OF THEIR

OWN

By Sarah Scoles --PopSci.com | Spring 2020 | Pg. 63

THE SNOW HASN’T STARTED YET THIS October evening in Boulder, Colorado, but the sharp wind and low clouds around Backcountry Pizza & Tap House foretell an early winter storm. Just before 6 p.m., Diane Fritz comes in from the cold, passing pinball machines and pool tables on her way to the back room. Setting down her bag, she takes off her down jacket and quickly orders an IPA before happy hour ends. “Lots of people probably won’t make it,” she says, guessing they’ll be reluctant to brave frozen roads. She shrugs and pulls out her Mac bearing a sticker that reads: “Map Porn.”

Fritz works for Auraria Library in Denver, assisting people who want to incorporate spatial information into their research. If a student were doing a project about energy, for example, she’d show them how to include the location of every oil well in the state.

Outside of her job, Fritz also helps lead a MeetUp group—gathering here tonight—that’s merging data about buildings into a crowdsourced map of the area.

The project could eventually help emergency services reach people more rapidly, make small businesses more visible, and show residents how their city (one of

interpretation in real time, providing the power to investigate any place as it is right now. In effect, anyone could find a live view of whatever spot on the planet they wanted to see. “The world basically becomes transparent,” says Koller, a systems director at the Aerospace Corporation, a federally funded research and development center in Southern California.

Koller has been monitoring the space industry since around 2015, taking note as satellites became easier and cheaper to build and launch. Today, more than 700 orbiting objects watch Earth all the time, up from 192 in 2014. That growth means that some continuously produce images, showing your house not as it looked in 2016 but as it looks while you read this. He has also seen artificial intelligence getting smarter. It can, using finely tuned algorithms, count cars and identify cats or your cousin. Finally, he’s seen that with phones and fast networks, people can stream such analyses. Take that to its logical endpoint, and—voilà!—a Geoint Singularity.

We’re not there yet, but we’re well on our way: Satellites capture images of a given sea or skyscraper daily. AI is good at narrow, specific tasks, like recognizing trees or gauging traffic, but integrating different streams—aerial pictures, CCTV feeds, Twitter threads, addresses, current trashtruck locations—remains a wicked problem. Given all that, no one can say if this singularity will come, or how, exactly, regular earthlings’ experiences would change if it did. Maybe people will watch the ice caps melt minute by minute. Maybe they will factcheck municipal claims about building new housing, or whether foreign ships are docking nearby. Maybe they will know, at all times, the best open parking space in the whole city. Or maybe they won’t care very much at all, and mapping skills will remain important but niche, deployed mostly by intelligence agencies, humanitarian groups, and corporations.

At Backcountry, the OpenStreetMap volunteers represent a future in which people do care. They want to know all about their place on the globe.

McAndrew pulls up a video on his computer and puts it on loop to set the mood. A dark globe appears on the screen. Bright dots and lines flash across its surface in a DayGlo seizure, tracing countries and cities and the spaces between. It’s an atlas of Earth, drawn chronologically as people add roads, houses, and schools. Other crowdsourced projects serve specific niches; StoryMap lets users highlight the locations in a series of events; Ushahidi helps people share information about things like police encounters.

But OpenStreetMap has the broadest ambitions: to capture the entire, always changing planet, and whatever people in each place care about.

McAndrew says, “Every line you see is an edit”—a place now on the map, now truer to the real world.

ALL IMAGES: EUROPEAN SPACE AGENCY

the fastest growing in the nation) is changing. About 40 people have volunteered so far.

Fritz flips open her laptop to find the how-to presentation she’ll give to any newcomers who venture in. For now, though, her only audience hangs above her: beer signs scattered around the room.

As her computer powers up, the other MeetUp leader, data scientist Margaret Spyker, arrives with member Jim McAndrew, who moved to Pennsylvania and is back for a visit. “If you order quick, you’ll make happy hour,” Fritz urges them.

Spyker grabs a menu from the table, the pair orders with just two minutes to spare, and the triad begins chatting. “Jimmy’s already checked in here on Foursquare,” Spyker says.

McAndrew smiles and shrugs: guilty. Speaking of, Fritz remembers, she’s been meaning to compliment him on a recent sprint on the fitness app Strava, where he tracks his impressively fast runs.

They pause and laugh at their predictability. Even their small talk is geospatial—all about things related to place and time—exactly as you’d expect from people who build maps in their spare hours.

Tonight, they hope to make progress on the so-called Denver Building Import. They’ll overlay shapes, sizes, and addresses from a government database onto a crowdsourced, free map of the world, and merge the two so that the structures become a permanent feature of the digital geography.

The project is part of an international effort called OpenStreetMap, founded in 2004. A cartographic Wikipedia, OSM relies on volunteers—a million since its start, making it the largest such endeavor— to create an ever-evolving representation of the planet. You can view it in a browser or within a platform like Facebook, which relies on it for location information. And although individuals work on it just for fun, it underpins services at huge companies like Amazon and Microsoft. OSM is important and different from maps like Google’s because it’s made by and for the people. It contains information its participants want—not, as McAndrew puts it, “what will make Google Maps money.”

All over, nerdy normals are using mappy data for specific pursuits: Archaeologists have uncovered hidden tombs; police have found missing people; relief organizations have dispatched aid to flood victims; retired spies have located weapons caches; conservationists have detected deforestation; artists have pinpointed secret military installations; and retailers have gauged vacancies in competitors’ parking lots.

A policy adviser and analyst named Josef Koller believes this plethora of frequently updated information might lead to a tipping point he dubs the Geoint Singularity: a time when people with no particular expertise or wealth have access to geospatial data and its

KOLLER NAMED THE GEOINT SINGULARITY the way you might name an unbuilt city for which you hadn’t drawn blueprints yet. While the future it represents still seems far off, the technology to achieve it has been developing for decades. The US government launched its first picture-taking satellites in the 1960s, and followed with ones dedicated to military and intelligence needs. Entities like NASA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and the United States Geological Survey sent up craft for scientific use. Their data is largely public, giving access to decades-old records that anyone can compare with today’s.

In the 1990s, business joined in, largely so it could sell pictures to spooky agencies. WorldView Imaging Corporation, now called Maxar, deployed the first

privately owned cameras to peer down at Earth.

Today the company also sells data to oil and gas companies to monitor pipelines, to mega-retailers to keep an eye on store traffic, and to developers to survey potential construction zones.

In the meantime, a virtual panopticon has emerged, one that no longer just takes pictures.

Satellites also nab radio transmissions, weather information, infrared images, and radar data. Drones overfly the planet, street cameras keep watch closer to the ground, smart devices broadcast locations, and governmental datasets—from curb cuts to county lines—live online. With each uptick in detail, the singularity draws closer.

It can only happen, though, if data reaches the public—not exactly the strong suit of private companies. Still, they do sometimes share. Maxar, for instance, ran the first major effort to involve laypeople in image analysis and mapmaking. Called Tomnod, the nine-year program enlisted amateurs during disasters, like the Malaysia Airlines crash in 2014, or for scientific research, such as counting Weddell seals in Antarctica for a 2016 census.

During crises, Maxar also makes imagery available to groups like Humanitarian OpenStreetMap, which sponsors crowdsourced efforts to plot crisis-plagued regions—say, after earthquakes, or to chart vaccine distribution, or understand refugee migration.

Companies also occasionally give their data to scientists who are studying climate change, journalists reporting on hard-to-reach places, and analysts trying to suss out global tensions. One of those is David Schmerler, who researches nuclear-weapon and missile developments at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey in California.

Schmerler doesn’t really have formal training in satellite-image analysis, but with his morning coffee in hand, he logs on to the website of a company called Planet, which operates around 140 satellites that take pictures of all the land on Earth every day. Some groups use the data to track deforestation, or calculate how many cargo ships reached a given port on Tuesday. But, as the caffeine hits, Schmerler zooms in on a few sites in North Korea. “If I see a lot of road activity, or if a building blows up, or they changed the roof, something is happening there,” he says. In the old days, you would learn of such things only days or months later, when an overscheduled satellite got around to taking a look. Today, you can see it today.

Schmerler sees all this geospatial data as a path to truth in a twisty world. “You can verify all sorts of claims using satellite imagery,” he points out. And when he says “you,” he means it. “When someone says something is changing in the world, we don’t have to rely on that statement. If someone says the ice caps are melting, you can log on and see that happen.”

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COLORADO IS A GEOSPATIAL HUB OF SORTS: It’s home to Maxar, NOAA offices, and a cluster of younger satellite startups, all of them full of people whose geo-knowledge base is generally better than average. Geospatial Amateurs, based in the Denver metro area, is another MeetUp that believes in the personal utility of all this data. “Amateurs” is a cheeky name. Many members, some of whom are also part of OSM, work in fields at least somewhat related to mapping or Earth observation, like environmental science or transportation. They don’t want sponsorships or corporate meddling or professional influence. Instead, the group wants to foster what leader Brian Timoney calls “roll your own” projects. It’s DIY, but with images, sensor readings, and maps instead of needle, thread, and aida cloth.

“The idea,” he says, “is you can answer geospatial questions that impact your everyday life.”

To keep the club more approachable, Timoney—a data analyst who runs a consulting firm—has tried to create a low-key vibe, starting with the MeetUp descriptions themselves. Take the invitation to the August 2019 gathering: A scientist demonstrates how to use radar and laser data to calculate snow depths on whatever black-or-blue slopes the attendees personally care about. “After this presentation, you’ll be looking around your ski mountain with a subtler eye,” read the website, “while the basic chads clogging I-70 will still be taking a resort’s midmountain snowpack-depth reading at face value.”

At other meetings, members show-and-tell their homebrewed solutions, which use municipal datasets, open-source information from agencies like NOAA, and legal hacks of companies like the Car2Go rental service. An actual Chad made a pedestrian map of sidewalks in the Denver area. Member Adam Bickford helped a city-council candidate optimize canvassing routes. And Ricardo Oliveira took the real-time feed of bus locations and created his own display. (Those examples happened before big political campaigns and organizations built their own versions.) “We want to get the word out about the rich variety of datasets that are available,” Timoney says, “and inspire people.”

Around the world, people have been inspired,

particularly by satellite imagery. Teachers send kids on global scavenger hunts. Homebodies see places they might never visit, guided by websites like Google Sightseeing (not affiliated with Google but rather with two guys). Farmers figuring out where their corn should go overlay snaps with Google Earth satellite maps. Hikers pore over them to find unmarked trails. Hunters consult them to predict where the animals will be.

If the singularity arrives, those pursuits, though, will look different: Second graders and skilled alpinists will be aware of the planet as it is—not as it was last week, last month, or last year. What if you could watch the travels of a specific herd of elk every day?

What if you could tell how crowded your tourist destination was an hour ago? What if day-trippers could peep the percentage of fall-turned leaves before they set out on the road?

AT BACKCOUNTRY PIZZA, MEANWHILE, the mappers finally have a new arrival, someone who has never worked on this project before: Travis Burt, a developer with utility company Franklin Energy. Burt immediately pulls out his laptop to learn how to begin merging Denver building data with the OpenStreetMap grid.

While Spyker and McAndrew chat in the corner, group leader Fritz tells Burt how to register so that he can see data from the Denver Regional Council of Governments—which, according to Fritz, “we lovingly call Dr. Cog.” Every two years, Dr. Cog pays to fly picture-taking planes over the metro area.

Analysts then use that imagery to trace the boundaries of buildings, accurate to around 3 inches.

While all of the information is public and free, it’s not especially layperson-friendly. But once it’s in OpenStreetMap, it won’t be much harder for anyone to access and understand than Google Maps.

Pinning numbers to virtual buildings is as important as the shapes and spots on the ground. “We don’t actually know, even in our super-urban area, what the addresses are,” Spyker says. That’s a problem for 911 operators, who can’t send responders to a location if they don’t know exactly where it is. Because

the Denver area is changing so rapidly, the mappers hope to keep updating the buildings, creating a historical record—a sort of pencil-mark-on-thedoorjamb growth chart—of how the city becomes what it will be. In the OSM, you can check out the archive of edits just like you can on Wikipedia.

Denver, of course, isn’t the only city lacking user-friendly data, and the problem is even more acute in rural and developing areas. Across the world, more than 150 OpenStreetMap chapters are helping to make their regions visible, tracking an ever-shifting landscape of roads and borders.

Coloring in the map can also just be fun. Spyker and Fritz are creating a city art directory, and soon they’ll be able to peg graffiti and murals to the walls of specific structures. Green thumbs could one day calculate how many hours of sunshine their building-shadowed urban gardens will get. A bookstore owner could estimate how many people will walk by their window display.

Under Fritz’s helpful tutelage, Burt finally gets to the point of actually working. He stares mirroreyed at the map, all of its layers shining from his screen, waiting for him to paint on another. “Ah,” he says, “this looks beautiful.”

“Did you hear that?” Fritz asks Spyker, who’s pulling up a site she made to help people plan pub crawls on bikes. “He said it was beautiful.”

THE MEETUP GROUP AT BACKCOUNTRY Pizza tonight represents the vanguard of the Geoint Singularity. But it’s also fair to ask if a tipping point is something the average person wants, needs, or will ever care about. Consider, for instance, that most folks are content with spinning through Google Earth, where the images are usually a couple of years old. “That satisfies most people’s basic

curiosity,” says Geospatial Amateurs’ Timoney.

The phenomenon’s godfather, Koller, notes that the singularity really requires a useful idea, one that cheaply and easily integrates real-time data and analysis, probably through a smartphone or browser interface. The glut of information is too much for our puny brains to parse quickly, which means we’ll also need AI to get smarter than it is now, and have the particular kind of savvy to serve up what people actually want. “The key point will be to find that killer application,” he says, a reason that an all-seeing eye on Earth would make the everyday easier or more efficient. “I don’t think anybody has really identified that yet.”

This wouldn’t be the first time we couldn’t clearly see the future. “If someone had asked me some question in 1980 about GPS, I’d be like, ‘I don’t know if it’s useful to see where you are,’” says Georgia Tech’s Mariel Borowitz, author of Open Space: The Global Effort for Open Access to Environmental Satellite Data. But here we are, with Tinder and Yelp and our general inability to navigate without a robot voice in our ear, because of GPS and our smartphones’ ability to put them in our palms.

Borowitz has questions, though, about how privacy protections will evolve. “I can imagine when you have ubiquitous data, your ability to track individuals or specific individual movements increases,” she says. The rub for watching the whole world change is that you are part of that world.

And not every “you” will get access to that change. “What I think stands in the way of closing the digital divide is the growing trend of the rich versus the poor,” Koller says. When only the wealthy can reach the bounty, they also control how information gets collected, used, and interpreted.

That’s why self-rolled initiatives aim to put power in more hands. Like, for example, the hands of people currently PayPaling their share of the pizza bill to Fritz. Only one of them—Burt—has mapped anything tonight. But that’s fine. As much as this group is about geospatial data, it’s also about connecting a community, and forging bright lines between them.

McAndrew tilts his eyes toward the window.

The storm has fully arrived. He stares for a second before pulling out his phone and punching up a real-time traffic display. “You can tell where the snow’s the worst,” he says, flashing his screen toward us. Green segments, where cars are flowing, slam into red ones, where drivers have slowed, flakes undoubtedly hypnotic in their headlights.

When we step outside, our eyes confirm the situation: The snow has begun to stick. It piles up on cars and blades of grass. It reveals the outlines of everything, showing our footprints as we walk away from each other, past buildings yet to be imported.

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HEAD

HOW DO WE KNOW WHAT DINOSAURS LOOKED LIKE?

Tyrannosaurs’ smooth, toothy skulls are quite reptilian. But unlike crocs or gators, dinosaurs were terrestrial, so they may have needed to trap moisture inside their mouths to stay hydrated.

That’s why many depictions have partial lips, more akin to lizards.

Studying eye sockets tells artists how to orient the peepers.

Frontward-angled holes, such as those on the Microraptor, would have pointed the eyeballs ahead.

BY SARA CHODOSH ILLUSTRATION BY THALES MOLINA YOU’VE SEEN ENOUGH MUSEUM

models, illustrations, and CGI predators that you’d likely recognize a Tyrannosaurus rex if you saw one. But how can you be sure? Nobody has ever clapped eyes on one in real life, and even the best skeletons are often only 90 percent complete. Specialists called paleoartists do base their re-creations on hard evidence (bones, feathers, and bits of skin) but, just as often, well-informed guesses. We may never know exactly how T. rex and other prehistoric creatures like the Microraptor gui looked, but here’s how we landed on the current incarnations of these deceased beasts.

STANCE

MUSCLE AND FAT

The way joints fit together informs a dino’s pose—along with a bit of inspiration from contemporary creatures. Without cartilage and other connective tissues, experts map extinct skeletons against how birds and reptiles stand and walk. Using those methods, they inferred that T. rex held its spine horizontally, which means the tail shot straight back rather than dragging as it was depicted prior to the ’70s.

Like reptiles, dinosaurs probably didn’t have much body fat, so they looked pretty swole. To determine just how stocky or svelte to render a species, paleontologists most often refer to the same muscle groups in birds. But sometimes there’s an evolutionary reason to make an area extra burly: A T. rex, for example, had to kill prey and bite through bone with only its jaw strength—hence its thick-neckedness.

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FEATHERS

Tiny cellular structures called melanosomes vary in color depending on their shape: Black ones are sausage-like; reds are round. Thanks to a very wellpreserved M. gui feather, we know it shone raven. Nanostructures also suggest it had an iridescent sheen, like a crow or magpie. We’ve never dug up a plumed T. rex, but its close relatives often have protofeathers on their heads, backs, and tails, so we suspect the king did too.

LIMBS

SKIN

Bones’ structures can indicate how appendages moved. T. rex, for one, used to be shown with its hands facing down, like it was playing a piano, but a 2018 analysis of turkey and alligator shoulders determined their palms may have turned in. Similarly, the angle between M. gui’s shoulder blades and rib cage may have prevented its wings from lifting high enough to flap; wind-tunnel tests suggest these dinos glided.

Soft tissue generally doesn’t last underground, but sometimes we get lucky. For the T. rex, a small slice of fossilized skin found in Montana enabled artists to make a stamp of the texture and apply it to the rest of the body. Coloring is trickier: Designers take cues from the environment more than the fossil record. T. rex lived in semimarshy areas and flood plains, so it likely had brownish-greenish dappled skin to blend in.

Perfection often requires iteration. Even after releasing a product, designers, programmers, and one engineers w ill continue to reand invent subsequent done generations. But sometimes they get it right the first time.

These items were so good from the get-go, they endured for decades.

BY

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STA N H O R AC Z E K A N D R O B V E RG E R

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PHOTOGRAPHS BY

G R E G O RY R E I D

BORN 1927

Otto Rohwedder reinvented bread when he created the first machine to slice it. His local paper called the innovation “a refinement that will receive a hearty and permanent welcome.� Only a few cities enjoyed the convenience until Taggart Baking Co. made Wonder Bread one of the first pre-portioned loaves sold nationwide, turning the super-soft carb into a glutenous rock star. The US government banned the culinary creation in 1943, in part to conserve paraffin (used in the waxed- paper packaging) for the war. But widespread public outcry forced Uncle Sam to quickly change course, making the return of sliced bread the greatest thing since sliced bread.

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BORN 1890

Your name for the venerable CMU probably depends upon where you live, but cinder block, breeze block, and hollow block all refer to an 8-by-8-by-16-inch brick with two or three internal voids. This mainstay of construction emerged when Harmon S. Palmer developed a process for using coal cinders—hence the name—to create something lighter, more insulating, and easier to work with than the solid hunks of his day. The industry standardized the dimensions in the 1930s, and coal waste eventually gave way to concrete and other materials, making the items heavier and stronger.

PIPER J-3 CUB

The Piper J-3 Cub was a cheap, simple, and quick machine with two seats placed one behind the other inside a tubular steel frame wrapped in cotton fabric. Beloved by everyone from weekend aviators to the US military, nearly 20,000 of them rolled out of Piper’s factory before the company upgraded the plane in 1947. Many still fly. Bush pilots in particular adore the J-3’s brawnier descendant, the Super Cub, because it is durable, easily repaired, and can take off or land on even the smallest sliver of ground.

The design remains so popular that the Washington state outfit CubCrafters builds several models based on the original, including a kit you can assemble yourself.

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PIPER J-3 CUB: MALCOLM HAINES/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO

BORN 1938

THE ORIGINALS

BORN 1880s

Before this ubiquitous office staple (sorry) came along, people used pins, ribbons, string, and other workarounds to secure sheaves of paper. Although inventors had experimented with wire wound in loops, Britain’s Gem Ltd. clinched the design with two narrow concentric ovals. That provided just enough torsion in the fastener and friction between the pages to keep everything together. Connecticut entrepreneur William Middlebrook patented a clip-winding machine in 1899, and American Clip Co. started cranking out the indispensable office supply stateside four years later. Today, its factory in Mississippi spits out 1,600 of them every minute.

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BORN 1618

Legend has it that metallurgist Avedis Zildjian hoped to make gold when he mixed copper and tin with a substance held secret to this day. He ended up creating an alloy that, unlike regular bronze, could resonate without cracking or shattering—just the thing for crafting cymbals that were less likely to break during exuberant performances. His descendants spent the next 300 years or so in Turkey before moving to the US, introducing their wares to jazz musicians, who appreciated both the sound and durability.

Today, you’ll find drummers in every genre playing Zildjians, each of them forged from a material that proved almost as valuable as gold.

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THE ORIGINALS

BERKEL FLYWHEEL MEAT SLICER BORN 1898

MEAT SLICER: COURTESY BERKEL

Cutting a few hunks off a salami or ham is not too strenuous. Shaving thousands of paper-thin slices for eight hours a day is a recipe for injury. That explains why Dutch butcher and amateur engineer W.A. Van Berkel invented the first mechanical meat slicer.

Cranking the cast- iron flywheel turns a pair of gears: One spins a cutting blade that is concave to minimize friction against the delicate flesh; the other drives a carriage that moves the meat back and forth through the whirling blade. Berkel’s electric models operate on the same principle, but discerning chefs prefer doing the job manually; heat generated by the motor can melt the fat and compromise the taste and texture of prosciutto and other delicacies.

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BORN 1842

Simple as it might seem, the adjustable wrench is an engineering marvel. Rotate its screw mechanism with your thumb, and a series of teeth—called a rack and worm—open or close the jaw to fit most any nut or bolt. Credit for this ingenious idea goes to British engineer Richard Clyburn, whose cast-iron “screw spanner” looks a lot like the do-it-all wonder in your toolbox right now. Chrome-plated steel now helps prevent corrosion, and modern models incorporate one knucklesaving improvement: a small tension spring to prevent slippage as you crank on particularly recalcitrant fasteners.

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THE ORIGINALS

BORN 1937

When industrial designer Egmont Arens sought to make a countertop version of the 80-quart behemoths ordinarily found mixing dough in commercial bakeries, he had to do more than just miniaturize. He coated his new Model K with easy-to-clean enamel and created the now-iconic tilting head, which let home bakers quickly add ingredients to their mixes.

The 3-quart bowl locks into place with a twist, and the head’s planetary action (think of Earth spinning on its axis as it revolves around the sun) ensures that nothing within the stainless-steel vessel goes unstirred.

KitchenAid later trademarked the design, which, aside from the addition of bright colors in 1955, remains largely the same today.

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HONDA SUPER CUB BORN 1958

SUPER CUB: DORLING KINDERSLEY LTD./ALAMY STOCK PHOTO

Back in the 1950s, many people considered motorcycles to be loud, finicky, disreputable machines. Honda changed that with the quiet, reliable, and easy-to-ride Super Cub. Its step-through frame, which placed the fuel tank under the seat, made saddling up a snap. Large 17-inch wheels could tackle the worst roads without sacrificing comfort or stability. The engine made impressive power for its size, a semiautomatic gearbox ditched the clutch lever, and the plastic fairing gave riders some protection from the wind. It was an immediate hit.

The motorbike has received a few updates over the years, and today’s models sport anti-lock brakes and LED headlamps. Honda has moved more than 100 million of them, making the Cub the bestselling motor vehicle in history.

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BORN 1954

The M3 found immediate success with photojournalists because of its speedy shooting. Instead of using two viewfinders— one for focusing and another for composing—the M3 featured a large, bright eyepiece to handle both. The “bayonet” lens mount let photographers save still more time by swapping glass with a twist and click rather than screwing it on and off. Leica employs the same system today, and modern M bodies work with almost any lens from the line’s history. The M3 also ditched the finicky film-advance knob of the era in favor of the simple thumb lever you now find on almost every camera that uses that wonderful medium. Leica still offers a 35mm film version that’s entirely mechanical and capable of enduring conditions that would brick most digital devices. It sells replacement parts too, because most people who shoot with one see no need to “upgrade.”

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PORSCHE 911

The engine in a Porsche 911 sits at the very back, a design that eschews the conventional wisdom that most of a vehicle’s mass should sit between its axles. And yet Porsche not only made the unconventional design work, it created one of the best sports cars of all time. Oh, sure, the 911 had a nasty habit of punishing inept drivers by spinning like a Matchbox car thrown across the kitchen floor.

But in the hands of a skilled pilot, the layout provides excellent traction and improved braking. That’s helped make this iconic automobile one of the most successful racing machines ever, even as it has grown larger and more luxurious. As always, that unusual drivetrain architecture is still wrapped in a sleek fastback body that’s impossible to mistake for anything else.

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PORSCHE 911: COURTESY PORSCHE

BORN 1963

THE ORIGINALS

BORN 1891

The first Swiss Army knife featured a blade, a screwdriver, a can opener, and an awl— everything a soldier could need to maintain a rifle, prepare a meal, or repair a saddle. (A later model for officers added a corkscrew, because officers were fancy.) When Karl Elsener started producing them for the Swiss military, he sandwiched the carbon-steel components in a hardwood handle. Its dark color made the original multitool difficult to spot if dropped, so he began painting the grip bright red in 1908. Another upgrade came in 1927 with the switch to rust-resistant stainless steel. Just two companies—Victorinox and Wenger— have manufactured the official tool, adding implements and colors over the years but never straying from the original goal of packing the greatest utility into the smallest space.

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back to the land

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To curb their climate impact, farmers are turning to ancient

by Brian Barth

techniques that catch more carbon than they spew.

illustrations by Patrick Leger

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Along a stretch of rural highway in the coastal plains of North Carolina sits an unusual forest.

The viridian-green branches of loblolly pines rise 60 feet above a carpet of soft, tufted grasses, rippling slightly in the breeze. The trees are widely spaced, 20 to 30 feet apart, with their lower limbs removed, creating an airy, cathedral-like canopy speckled with sunlight filtering through the needles.

The woodland has a strangely serene, primeval feel. A sudden wave of grunting reveals large black shapes moving in the distance. A pickup approaches, further breaking the reverie, and out hops a slender middle-aged man in a ball cap.

“Buron Lanier,” he says, extending a hand. “Sorry I’m late.

I was just finishing up with a calf.”

The shapes, Lanier’s Red Angus cattle, amble over. This forest, 100 acres of his 400-acre Piney Woods Farm, is their grazing ground—a modern incarnation of an ancient technique called silvopasture, an integration of forest and fauna.

To Lanier—a third-generation grower whose ancestors raised tobacco where his pines now stand—the unusual scheme, which he’s cultivated over the past 30-plus years, is common sense. The trees boost his bottom line through periodic timber sales, and cattle fatten up 20 days quicker

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when not forced to munch on sudangrass in 90-degree heat.

He waxes eloquently about the wildlife habitat, erosion control, and sense of calm this land provides. “I love the pristineness, the peacefulness of the trees,” he says in a soothing drawl as he drives through his ranch as if on a Jurassic Park agriculture safari. He points out the calf he midwifed earlier, wet and wobbly in a sweetly scented glade. “Who wouldn’t want to give birth in a nice shady bed of grass?”

Minus the pickup truck and some electric fencing, it’s a scene one might have encountered in the Neolithic period, when humans first domesticated cows from the aurochs roaming the Fertile Crescent. The practice was among the earliest agricultural endeavors, but the bare fields and feedlots of modern farms and ranches have largely swept it away.

Environmental scientists, though, see the reemergence of silvopasture as a means to slow down climate change.

Livestock produce two-thirds of all agricultural emissions, and methane from burping cows is the largest slice of that.

Lanier is skeptical that global warming is real, but his pines, in siphoning CO2 from sky to earth, are nonetheless helping

BACK TO THE LAND

cancel out his bovine contribution to planetary disaster.

Farmers and ranchers across the country are turning back the agricultural clock in order to convert the land they steward into ammunition in the climate fight. In total, cultivation sends about 8 billion tons of carbon into the air each year. That’s nearly one-quarter of emissions— roughly the same as heat and electricity production combined, and far more than transportation.

Anecdotally, the United States Department of Agriculture sees a tiny but growing number of silvopasture farms, while other methods that suck greenhouse gases from the air— collectively known as carbon farming—are experiencing greater resurgences. The once-ubiquitous practice of plowing, which chucks soil-bound carbon into the atmosphere as it churns the ground, has disappeared from 21 percent of acreage. Cover crops, typically sown in the offseason and left in fields to decompose, are also rising in popularity.

Such practices have been on the upswing since the 1990s, even among the large-scale operations that supply the likes of General Mills and McDonald’s. But for the cash-strapped midsize farmers who represent the bulk of American growers, adoption can be a challenge. While these methods can slash costs (less tillage means less tractor fuel, and richer soil requires fewer fertilizers), they can also risk yields.

Agronomists are working on a road map to help folks invest in changes—and to elevate climate-conscious practices to a place where we can feed the world’s 7.5 billion people.

Finding those answers is vital for the planet. According to analysis from Rattan Lal, director of Ohio State University’s Carbon Management and Sequestration Center, farm-based emissions trapping could get us most, if not all, of the way to the goals of the Paris Agreement. “This is if somebody at the United Nations turns a switch and says, ‘Thou shalt do everything perfectly,’” he says. “Even if we can achieve half, or a third, of what’s possible under optimal conditions, we will have made a difference.”

as he shoos a giant black-and-yellow spider. Many of the methods they track—including varying levels of tillage, cover crops, and livestock integration—are modern-day analogs of Neolithic agricultural life. What they find will help determine how best to replenish the carbon the ground has lost.

Land naturally wants to hang on to carbon. Vegetation (the more, the better) inhales the element from the sky. Roots excrete some of it into the soil, feeding underground microbes, which poop and die and aggregate with decomposing flora and fauna to form humus, a dark, crumbly substance that is 50 to 60 percent carbon. A sponge for nutrients and moisture, the material can remain stable in the soil for millennia.

Early farming scarcely disturbed this cycle. Chickens tamed by Southeast Asian hunter-gatherers some 10,000 years ago foraged in forests rich with early crops like bananas and mangoes. Similarly, the Amazon was once a loosely kept garden of more than a hundred species, including cacao and pineapple. Parts of the rainforest still hold terra preta—“dark soil” in Portuguese—a nutrient-filled groundcover.

As societies grew and needed to scale up agricultural production, carbon-rich landscapes became carbonimpoverished. Farmers set fire to larger and larger tracts, the easiest path to clear the ground—but also a huge polluter, and a gateway to the second climate culprit, the plow.

Some 7,000 years ago, Mesopotamians developed the ard, a wooden hoe-like implement pulled behind draft animals to stir the earth in barley and chickpea fields. Sometime around year zero, it evolved into an iron tool. When John Deere introduced its ubiquitous tractors in 1918, the practice entered an exponential growth curve.

The glinting steel of a plow blade holds obvious allure.

Digging uproots weeds that hog nutrients, water, and sun, and it loosens the ground so tender seedlings can easily grow.

×

AT CH ERRY FA RM, A 2 ,20 0 -AC R E FAC ILI TY

affiliated with the University of North Carolina, not far from Lanier’s ranch, biologist Tomás Moreno weaves down narrow aisles of organically raised cornstalks and stops at an airtight metal chamber resting atop the soil. Slipping a syringe through a rubber gasket in the lid, he draws air that’s percolated up from the ground. This sample is bound for a USDA lab that will analyze its greenhouse-gas content.

As part of a long-term project kicked off in 2018, Moreno and his colleagues repeat this process throughout the year on plots representing more than a dozen cultivation regimes.

“We still have more questions than answers,” Moreno says,

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But exposing soil lets carbon compounds oxidize into the atmosphere, where they can no longer do what they’re meant to: feed plants. The plow cuts like a double-edged sword— increasing yields but cementing reliance on fertilizer.

Thanks to these methods, we’ve released up to 600 gigatons of carbon—about 30 percent of what humanity’s flung into the atmosphere—since we began farming. Soil scientist Lal estimates that it’s possible to recapture 4 to 5 gigatons per year through better land management.

Today, ditching tillage seems unfathomable, but ecosystems have long managed to produce robust growth without it. In his 1943 book, Plowman’s Folly, American agronomist Edward Faulkner posited that we’d be better off working the land in a way that mimics nature.

Faulkner’s wisdom languished in obscurity for decades, but soil depletion has slowly forced cultivators to embrace the idea. “No-till” tractor attachments emerged in the 1980s and ’90s. These cut a slit through crop residue without disturbing the soil, leaving a carbon-rich mulch atop fertile dirt.

Parking the plow isn’t a blanket solution, though.

Small-seeded vegetables like lettuce struggle to take root, while large-seeded commodities like corn and soy (the two most planted crops in the US) readily adapt. A farm’s yields might dip in the first few years after tilling stops, but adopters who master the art find they produce just as much—with significant savings on labor and fuel. Devotees tout the return of carbon to the ground as a panacea: Healthier soil begets healthier crops that require less fertilizer.

Cover crops further bolster the carbon-farming lifestyle.

Sown to enrich the soil rather than for harvest, plants like clovers, vetch, and various inedible radishes and ryegrasses are among the most common. Started after harvest in fall, before planting in spring, or as groundcover during the main growing season, they pull in carbon and add nutrients to the earth after they die. The cost adds overhead to a stead’s delicate fiscal existence, but according to a USDA survey of farmers, improved yields and reduced fertilizer spending help the practice pay for itself in an average of three years.

Those who combine no-till and cover crops capture about a half-ton of carbon per acre annually, according to analysis from Project Drawdown, an international collaboration of academics and advocates that assesses the potential impact of mitigation strategies.

Hardcore carbon farmers reach even further into the past and integrate trees—like Lanier and his silvopasture.

The approach sponges up nearly 2 tons of atmospheric CO2 per acre per year. Other forms of mixing crops with woods (termed “agroforestry”) grab even more, making it the most potentially impactful shift, according to Drawdown’s data.

The method can also be lucrative. Shade-grown chocolate fetches a premium for Brazilian farmers, and the hogs that become Spain’s famed jamón Ibérico fatten on oak-dropped

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acorns. Yet adoption faces a huge hurdle: It can take decades to recoup the cost of planting and nurturing a canopy.

At Cherry Farm, lead USDA researcher Alan Franzluebbers has begun to chew on the early data from his team’s gas sampling. As expected, the systems with the least soil disturbance and the most plant life hold more carbon.

But smaller insights could lead to new tweaks. For instance, pine and walnut trees are better sinks than cypress and ash (good news for Lanier). Ultimately, Franzluebbers will convert those findings into climate-conscious recommendations for the sandy plains of eastern North Carolina; similar experiments are running parallel in other regions. “We have to return carbon to the soil,” he says. “We need to move much quicker than we are.” Intrepid farmers aren’t waiting around. ×

ON A CLEAR, COLD DAY IN EARLY MARCH 2019,

Justin Jordan, a fifth-generation grower in Lacona, Iowa, pores over old maps spread across his dining-room table. One creased, yellowing chart shows a soil-conservation plan his grandfather created with the USDA in the 1950s, including terraces for controlling erosion and areas designated for tree planting. The agency was working to reverse critical topsoil loss from decades of mass-scale plowing.

His grandfather implemented portions of the scheme. But new synthetic fertilizers, which could boost yields by 50 percent, made the situation less dire, so he continued tilling their corn and soybean fields each year. As did Jordan’s dad, and most other farmers. Over the past 150 years, cultivation has chewed up about half of Earth’s topsoil.

Jordan, an impeccably polite, soft-spoken man in his late 30s, stopped plowing and began planting cover crops when he took over in the early 2000s. “I was eager to do things in a different way,” he says. “It just seemed like every year the topsoil was getting thinner.” Jordan tends 410 acres—larger than most farms hawking vegetables at Saturday markets, but tiny compared with 10,000-acre corporate operations.

Aerial photos show the contrast between his land and that of other farmers, most of whom continue heavy tilling. His soil is dark and rich, but from the air, his fields appear lighter, covered in accumulated mulch. Strips of perennial hay grass (for his cattle) and native prairie species like milkweed meander across the slopes—year-round flora that pump carbon into the soil. Neighboring barren fields steadily release it.

Once Jordan brings in his corn in October, he sows a cover of rye among the drying stalks that stays green through the following spring, when he cuts it down and seeds next year’s crop in the mulch. He sprinkles his soybean fields before the September harvest with a cocktail of rye, radishes, and oats, creating a mini forest beneath the

BACK TO THE LAND

knee-high cash crop. With all these changes, his yields have remained roughly the same as his neighbors’.

Soon, folks like Jordan might gain a financial edge.

The Terraton Initiative, the nation’s first carbon market dedicated to agriculture, launched in June 2019 out of the farm-tech startup Indigo Ag. Companies that want to offset their emissions purchase credits; Terraton then pays growers $15 per ton for the carbon their land captures. Within six months, farmers tending a total of 10 million acres worldwide—encompassing plenty of the massive steads that are the face of modern agriculture— expressed interest in signing up.

More cash would be nice, but climate change is the motivating factor for Jordan—out of global concern, and to keep his harvest from washing away. “When I was a kid, getting 2 or 3 inches of rain in one storm hardly ever happened,” he says. “Now we’re regularly seeing 6 or 7.”

Increased carbon leads to erosion-resistant clumps called aggregates, plus a layer of plant residue that softens downpours. “I can take those big rains,” Jordan says, “and in a dry spell, having that blanket on the soil keeps me from losing moisture.” For every percentage-point increase in organic matter (the carbon-rich product of decomposition), an acre of topsoil can hold an additional 20,000 gallons of water, according to USDA data.

As Jordan gives me a Jeep tour of his farm, passing a frozen pond and waist-high swaths of buff-colored prairie grasses, he ponders his options for grabbing more carbon. He’d like to find a way to add trees, but it’s a

long-term investment with little short-term upside. Crop prices have plummeted in recent years, so owners have scant appetite for risk, he says. “I’m in survival mode.”

Still, he’s proud to be part of a growing minority pushing carbon-farming practices as a weapon in the climate fight. In early 2019, he attended a Faith, Farmers, and Climate Action meeting at a church in Des Moines.

The organizers—a nonprofit that promotes a religious response to global warming—have had early success in rallying a handful of growers in conservative Iowa communities to stop tilling and to plant cover crops.

However they’re recruited, carbon farmers need to become an army. Growers like Jordan represent the bulk of American agriculture (the average stead measures 443 acres), so the practice reaching its potential requires that both midsize outfits and larger-scale cultivators get on board. Taken together, Earth’s 12 billion acres of farmland could absorb all the CO2 that has built up in the atmosphere. Currently, the average concentration of carbon in soil is about 1 percent; bumping it to 3—ideal growing conditions—on 30 percent of fields would get us there.

Jordan doesn’t care what incentive it takes—cash, a desire like Lanier’s to be a “good steward” of the land, or the satisfaction of rebuilding topsoil—to reach the unconverted. Realizing that our collective fate might hinge on this revolution, he’s frustrated with the pace of adoption.

“Most farmers will do it only if they see a financial gain.”

But, if nothing else, he’s gained something priceless: “I feel like I’m farming with a clear conscience.”

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One massive rail project, 10 millennia of history, 60-plus excavations, 143 miles of track, and thousands of skeletons. How a crew of British archaeologists will make sense of their‌

BIGGEST. DIG. EVER.

MAKING WAY Workers exhume rows of graves near London’s Euston Station, the terminus of a new train line.

by Megan Gannon

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MATTHEW FLINDERS IS BARELY FORTY, but he looks seventy. His once dark hair gleams white, his already slight frame skeletal. As a captain in the British Royal Navy, he’s survived shipwreck, imprisonment, and scurvy, but this kidney infection will do him in. Facing death, he finishes writing a book that will change the world as Europeans know it.

Flinders completed the first circumnavigation of the “Terra Australis Incognita,” or “Unknown South Land,” in 1803. A decade later, he compiles his writings, maps, charts, and drawings of the rugged coasts, extensive reefs, fertile slopes, unusual wildlife, and other features of the faraway continent that he suggests naming “Australia.”

His wife places a copy of the freshly printed book, A Voyage to Terra Australis, in his hands as he lies unconscious in their central London home the day before his death in July 1814.

Later, he’s interred at St. James’s burial ground, but within a few decades, the tombstone is missing. When the railways at nearby Euston Station expand in the mid-1800s, workers relocate, pave over, or strip graves. Lost in a subterranean terra incognita, the explorer might lie somewhere under track 12. Or 15. Or the garden that’s replaced the cemetery. No one knows.

Today, a bronze Flinders at the station entrance crouches over a map alongside his beloved cat Trim, who also made the trip around Australia. If the statue could lift its head, it would see commuters rushing across the plaza past construction barriers. The hub is expanding again, now as a new terminus of the huge HS2 high-speed rail project, which will connect the capital with points north.

This time, though, a team is carefully exhuming and documenting remains before the tunnel-boring, track-laying, and platform-building begins. They know that Flinders and an estimated 61,000 others were buried here between 1789 and 1853. But, with only 128 out-of-place headstones remaining, they don’t know who they’ll find.

Caroline Raynor, an archaeologist with the construction company Costain, leads the excavation. On a typically overcast day in January 2019, she oversees work beneath what she calls her “cathedral to archaeology,” a white bespoke

tent so massive that it could house a Boeing 747. It shields a hard-hat-clad crew of more than 100—and the dead, sometimes stacked in columns of up to 10 as much as 27 feet deep.

Where the London clay is waterlogged and oxygenless, delicate materials survive. Clearing earth by hand and trowel over the course of a yearslong job, Raynor’s diggers uncover bodies wearing wooden prosthetics, as well as the Dickensian bonnets that used to hold the deads’ mouths closed. One man still sports blue slippers from Bombay. Even plants and flowers remain.

“Some of them were still green,” Raynor says.

Suddenly, a crewmember runs over with news about a grave fairly near the surface. Very little of the coffin is intact—wood doesn’t fare well in the granular, free-draining topsoil—so there’s nothing to open. A lead breastplate rests atop a bare skeleton: “Capt. Matthew Flinders R.N. Died July 1814 Aged 40 Years.”

The discovery is one small chapter in the saga the HS2 project promises to tell. If the first stage of the $115 billion initiative is fully realized, the train will cut through ancient woodlands, suburbs, and cities along the 143 miles between Birmingham in the north and London in the south—though not before teams like Raynor’s uncover any underground treasures. “It looks like we’re finding archaeology from every phase of post-glacial history,” says Mike Court, the archaeologist overseeing the more than 60 planned digs for HS2 Ltd., the entity carrying out the rail initiative. “It’s going to give us an opportunity to have a complete story of the British landscape.”

With more than 1,000 scientists and conservators involved, the scale of HS2’s excavations is unprecedented in the UK, and perhaps all of Europe. However, it’s hardly an outlier. As development continues to tear through hidden civilizations across the continent, investigations like this are becoming common; in fact, they’re often required by legislation. While researchers once bored trenches exclusively on behalf of museums and universities, many now work on job sites. These commercial archaeologists dig up and analyze finds for private companies like the Museum of London Archaeology (MOLA), a primary contractor on HS2. Because their work is tied to the pace and scale of building projects, their targets are quite random, and discoveries can be boom or bust. Sometimes they’ll unearth just a few graves during housing construction; other times they’ll turn up dizzying amounts of data on battlefields and cemeteries in the path of huge public works.

When efforts at Euston wrapped in December

THE UNDERGROUND The initial 143-mile leg of the UK’s HS2 rail line will run through 60-plus historic sites.

4/RADBOURNE Deserted medieval town,

1/CURZON STREET A Birmingham rail yard— and nearby burial ground and meeting house

a graveyard

2 1

Prehistoric villages with rough field boundaries

settlements 3

4 5 7

by earthworks

8 9

10

The British Isles

11

10/ST. MARY’S 12th-century church and graveyard

13

13/ST. JAMES’S BURIAL GROUND 19th-century cemetery in central London

12

Birmingham

12/COLNE VALLEY Prehistoric agrarian settlements

ILLUSTRATION BY

VIOLET RE ED

2019, Raynor’s crew had uncovered some 25,000 of the boneyard’s residents, including ghosts like auctionhouse founder James Christie and sculptor Charles Rossi, whose caryatids watch over the nearby Crypt of St. Pancras Church. Gazing at the site from her makeshift office, Raynor marvels at the scope of the work still ahead: “It’s very difficult to dig a hole anywhere in the UK without finding something that directly relates to human history in these islands.”

Construction and archaeology weren’t always so close-knit. Through much of the 20th century, builders in the UK often haphazardly regarded artifacts and ruins.

Sites were rescued only by the goodwill of developers or ad hoc government intervention.

The chance discovery of the Rose in the late 1980s spurred England to adopt new rules. Among the brothels, gaming dens, and bear-baiting arenas on the south bank of the River Thames, the Rose was one of the first theaters to stage the works of William Shakespeare, including the debut of Titus Andronicus. The construction team had the right to pave over it after only a partial excavation, and the government wasn’t eager to step in to fund a preservation.

Actors like Sir Ian McKellen, Dame Judi Dench, and Sir Laurence Olivier joined calls to save the 16th-century playhouse. At 81, Dame Peggy Ashcroft was on the front line blocking bulldozers. The builders wound up saving the theater, spending $17 million more than planned.

To avoid future conflicts, in 1990 the country adapted a “polluter pays” model for mitigating harm to cultural heritage. Now developers must research potential discoveries as part of their environmental-impact assessment, avoid damaging historic resources, and fund the excavation and conservation of significant sites and artifacts.

That tweak led to “vast changes” in the UK, says Timothy Darvill, an archaeologist at Bournemouth University in England. “Just the sheer number of projects that were undertaken increased manifoldly.” According to his research, thousands of digs occurred per year in Britain from 1990 to 2010, increasing tenfold from decades prior.

Other governments followed suit. Most European countries have signed the 1992 Valletta Convention, a treaty that codified the practice of preservation in the face of construction. Findings published by the European Archaeological Council in 2018 show that developers now lead as much as 90 percent of investigations on the continent.

Archaeologists have opportunities to uncover enormous swaths of history on sites that logistically and financially might have been inaccessible before—especially in the course of major civil-engineering initiatives.

Infrastructure authorities have funded multimillion-dollar projects to turn up mass graves on Napoleonic battlefields in the path of an Austrian highway, and 2,000-year-old ruins under Rome during a subway expansion.

Before HS2 became Britain’s banner big dig, Crossrail was the nation’s largest such program. Beginning in 2009, efforts ahead of the 73-mile train line across London revealed thousands of gems at 40 sites: fragments of a medieval fishing vessel, Roman skulls, a Tudor-era bowling ball, and 3,000 skeletons at the graveyard of the notorious Bedlam mental asylum.

To carry out all this work, many nations have competitive commercial markets for research and excavation. MOLA, an offspring of the Museum of London, is one of the largest British firms, and HS2 is one of its major clients. Its field crew surfaces thousands of objects destined for cataloging by a team of staffers on the other side of town.

MOLA headquarters sits in an old wharf building on the edge of a canal in East London’s Islington borough. The ground-floor loading bay leads to a labyrinth of rooms of dusty 20-foot-high shelves packed with dirt-caked finds trucked in from the field. Pallets and containers full

OPENING SPREAD AND ABOVE: ADRIAN DENNIS/AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES

ALL THAT REMAINS An archaeologist carefully cleans one of the thousands of bodies uncovered in St. James’s burial ground in London.

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of architectural stones, pottery fragments, and tubes of sediment flank narrow aisles.

Thanks to the glut of construction-backed excavations, spaces like these see a constant flow of goods demanding attention.

In a small office near the maze, a researcher holds a human skull. Alba Moyano Alcántara is a “processor,” using a paintbrush to dab away soil on the centuries-old cranium. Like a triage nurse, she’ll decide the next steps for these remains and other artifacts. Damp bones will dry slowly on racks in a warm room down the hall; pieces of metal get X-rayed to reveal their original forms.

Eventually, they’ll head upstairs, where MOLA’s specialists catalog the minute details of the finds. In an open-plan office, senior osteologists Niamh Carty and Elizabeth Knox inspect a pair of incomplete skeletons. Carty studies the top half of a young woman; Knox, the bottom half of a man. Truncated bodies are common in old boneyards, where new graves often cut into old ones. Confidentiality agreements with clients keep the researchers mum on the exact origin of the remains, but they offer that these are from a “post-medieval cemetery.” If it wasn’t St. James’s, it was a place like it.

The thousands of skeletons that pass through MOLA contribute to a database of London’s population-wide rates of pathology, injuries, and other bioarchaeological information from prehistory to the Victorian era.

“Every skeleton we look at is adding to the bigger picture,” Carty says.

She lingers over a rotted-out tooth, which likely caused a painful abscess before this young woman died. Knox’s skeleton’s lower legs have an irregular curvature, perhaps a sign that he suffered from rickets in his youth; his spine has Schmorl’s nodes, little indentations on the vertebrae created by age or manual labor. “Archaeologists probably all have them,” Knox quips.

Sometimes a small sample can shed light on nationwide phenomena. The Crossrail dig uncovered a burial pit from the 17thcentury Great Plague of London, which killed nearly one-quarter of the population.

In teeth from that site, researchers discovered the DNA of the bacteria that caused the outbreak. Analysis of all the HS2 remains might one day reveal migration and disease patterns from the Middle Ages to the Industrial Revolution.

MOLA employees also gain insight from

individual artifacts. Across the office, Owen Humphreys and Michael Marshall— so-called finds specialists—study uncommon relics weeded out from the pottery pieces, nails, animal bones, and other abundant objects destined for bulk inventorying. “I once likened our job to being the seagull in The Little Mermaid,” Humphreys says. “People bring us things, and we take a wild stab in the dark as to what they are—” “—a very well-informed stab,” Marshall adds. He holds the wooden leg of a Roman couch found on the Thames waterfront, its paint still red nearly 2,000 years later. “You very rarely get things like this in Britain,” he says. “It’s lucky that we got an opportunity to find out a bit more about what people’s homes looked like.”

These inspections can help determine the objects’ fates. The Museum of London houses the world’s largest archaeological archive of more than 7 million items from more than 8,000 excavations awaiting further study, placement in a collection, or, in the case of the St. James’s bones, reburial. A precious few finds will earn spots on public display.

Leather shoes, wooden combs, an amber carving of a gladiator’s helmet, and some 600 other Roman artifacts adorn the ground floor of Bloomberg LP’s new European headquarters in central London.

The nine-story structure sits on the site of a 3rd-century Roman temple dedicated to the god Mithras. First discovered during construction of an office building in the 1950s, the Mithraeum suffered an infamously botched reconstruction deemed “virtually

meaningless” by the site’s lead archaeologist.

After MOLA reexcavated in 2014 on behalf of Bloomberg, the developers had another shot to tell the temple’s story. Now visitors descend several flights of stairs into a darkened room. Light and mist create the illusion of complete walls extending from the stubby foundations of the subterranean temple.

Footsteps and ominous Latin chanting piped in from the speakers crescendo, transforming this ruin into the site of secret cult rituals.

To be sure, many builders see archaeology as a compulsory, time-consuming, and expensive hurdle. There’s little publicly available information on the costs for these investigations, even for HS2, but according to the research of Bournemouth archaeologist Darvill, digging might add an extra several million dollars, depending on the scope of the plans. Still, the flashy new Mithraeum is evidence that some have found a symbiosis in using the past to try to make their projects more palatable to locals. Across the city in Shoreditch, a once-gritty East London neighborhood now synonymous with gentrification, the remains of a 16th-century Shakespearean playhouse called the Curtain Theatre will be incorporated into a new multipurpose development. According to the ad copy, the Stage will be an “iconic new showcase for luxury living,” and the “first World Heritage Site in East London.”

The archaeology story of HS2 will be too sprawling to fit neatly in a basement or lobby. It will take years to process and analyze all its finds. As of fall 2019, only the two biggest digs had finished: St. James’s and the excavation of another 6,500 graves from an Industrial Revolution-era cemetery at the Birmingham station.

HS2 archaeologists are now running test trenches to decide precisely which spots they’ll uncover in between. “Some of them are once-in-a-generation archaeological sites, and some are smaller, still interesting, but not large scale,” says project field lead Court. We already know that HS2 will cut through a mysterious prehistoric earthwork called Grim’s Ditch in the hills outside London, and farther north, a Roman town and a millennia-old demolished church. Researchers also hope to find traces from the Battle of Edgecote Moor, which broke out in Northamptonshire in 1469 during the Wars of the Roses.

The fate of HS2’s archaeological ambitions, however, is entangled (CONTINUED ON P. 118)

DOGS

A LOVE STORY IT’S ONE OF THE LONGEST RELATIONSHIPS IN HISTORY. SCIENTISTS ARE RECONSIDERING WHO STARTED IT.

BY KAT M C GOWAN PHOTOGRAPHS BY THE VOORHES

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eyes on his chest. Chevy stands stock-still, ears perked, trembling slightly. Nonscientifically speaking, this dog is completely weirded out. From the other side of the A BLACK-AND-WHITE BOSTON TERRIER NAMED CHEVY, mirror, the scene is both agonizAS SLEEK AND DAPPER AS A SEAL IN A TUXEDO, TROTS ing and hilarious, like the world’s most awkward date. Heroically, Jo CRISPLY INTO THE SOUNDPROOF TESTING ROOM. HIS keeps a straight face.

JAUNTY CONFIDENCE WILL FADE QUICKLY AS A TEAM The data from these tests—plus OF RESEARCHERS SUBJECTS HIM TO A SERIES OF DNA samples—will ultimately give Hecht new hints about what PSYCHOLOGICAL EXPERIMENTS THAT WILL DAUNT, changed in dogs after their wild DISMAY, AND ULTIMATELY BAFFLE HIM. POOR CHEVY leap into tameness. Biologically, they are almost all wolf; techniIS ABOUT TO BE GASLIT FOR THE SAKE OF SCIENCE. cally, they’re the subspecies Canis lupus familiaris, but they are fundamentally difThis spiffy little terrier is volunteer number one on ferent from their forebears. You can hand-raise a day number one of an ambitious project launched wild animal to be tame, and that individual might

by Harvard University evolutionary neuroscientist be gentle and mild-mannered. But domestication Erin Hecht to answer basic questions about what is a different story. For dogs and other animals dogs do and why they do it. She plans to collect who live with us, tolerance and trust are engraved data on the psychology and behavior of hundreds in their genes and in their brains. of them across all breeds over many years: how Hecht’s study is a way to get insight into the easily they make friends, how well they behave, broader subject of how neural matter evolves unhow they feel about vacuum cleaners. Four video der strong environmental pressures—in this case, cameras document Chevy’s reactions to an experthe very peculiar circumstances of living with, imenter’s precisely scripted maneuvers. From a depending on, and loving another species. “I’m inreception room next door, the rest of Hecht’s team terested in dogs, both for the sake of dogs, and for watches through a one-way mirror. what we can learn about humans,” she says. “But After some preliminary scratches and pats, more generally, dogs are a great way to understand Harvard undergraduate Hanna McCuistion gives basic processes about how brains evolve.”

Chevy a few treats, then places the next one unShe is among a wave of investigators puzzling der a glass jar. He sniffs eagerly at it, then gazes out exactly how these furballs got to be our facebeseechingly at her, cocking his head back and licking, tail-wagging, number-one fans. We prefer forth, turning up his dials to maximum cute. A to think that humans wrote the story of domesclassic move, Hecht explains: Faced with a diffitication: Some galaxy-brain hunter- gatherer cult situation, a dog quickly turns to a human for kidnapped a wolf puppy, then shaped a new spehelp. After 20 seconds, McCuistion lifts the jar for cies as a prey-sniffing partner, watchdog, and him, and he gobbles up the snack. companion. But increasingly, most researchers A few more simple tests, then she ushers Chevy think that dogs were the original authors of this into a large wire cage and leaves him alone in the tale. Long ago, some wolves hitched their destiny room. He fidgets and softly whimpers. Experito ours, launching an extraordinary love affair menter two, Stacy Jo, soon enters, but she turns that forever entangled both our fates. away, facing the wall for a few long moments while Though archaeology can help us pin down the Chevy stares fixedly at her back. Without makwhen and where of dog domestication (current ing eye contact or speaking, she approaches his thinking is that it happened at least 15,000 years cage and sits precisely 1 foot in front of the door, 96

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ONE NIGHT IN 2011, HECHT AND HER

miniature Australian shepherd, Lefty, were on the couch watching TV when a show came on about the legendary Belyaev foxes. Dmitry Belyaev was a Soviet geneticist in the early 1950s, a time when Moscow suppressed genetic research as a product of the imperialist West.

Unable to study his chosen field openly, Belyaev hit upon an ingenious plan. He could experimentally tame foxes raised for their coats. Since animals kept by humans tend to reproduce more frequently, officially he’d be accelerating Soviet fur production. But the project would sneak in some science. His theory was that just 98

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by breeding for tameness, what’s now called the “domestication syndrome” would emerge: more-juvenile behavior, and physical changes like white splotches on the belly and face, floppy ears, shorter snouts, and smaller teeth.

The research got going in earnest in 1959 in Siberia. Belyaev’s partners selected animals that were simultaneously less fearful and less aggressive (these traits typically go hand in hand), then crossed them. Just four generations later, in 1963, when collaborator Lyudmila Trut approached a fox cage, one of the kits wagged its tail at her.

By 1965, a few juveniles were rolling on their backs and whimpering for attention, just like puppies. The researchers also kept a population of randomly bred control animals, and later, a strain of extremely fearful, combative ones. This landmark study continues to this day.

Hecht already knew this history. But the show sparked a realization: Nobody had analyzed the foxes’ brains. Usually, humans breed goats or sheep or other domesticated animals for many traits, including temperament, size, and coat color, all of which might leave inadvertent marks on the mind. But differences between tame and regular fox noggins could be due only to selection

THANK YOU RACHEL FUSARO (RACHELFUSARO.COM) AND HER DOG, FINNEGAN

ago in Europe, Asia, or both), bones are mostly silent on the how and the why of this story. By studying other canids like foxes and wolves, and by analyzing dog genes, behavior, and brains—their sweet, friendly, trusting brains— researchers are developing new ideas about how the big bad wolf became the dear little dog.

Some argue that their social intelligence is what makes them extraordinary; others point to their devotion, that deep soulful craving for humans.

As the first domesticated species, dogs are also a model for how other mammals—including us—got that way. Scientists see in their genes and minds hints about our own unusually tolerant nature.

During much of the human journey from just another primate to world-conquering hominid, our four-legged pals have been right by our side. They are our familiar, our echo, our shadow, and as we now look more closely into their eyes, we can glimpse a new image of ourselves.

DOGS: A LOVE STORY

on behavior—what Belyaev and Trut did. They’d stand out like a beacon, illuminating exactly which circuits or new neurochemistry turned a cringing, snarling little vixen into a sweetie. And they’d point the way to a deeper understanding of how evolution can remold a mind.

“On the one hand, there’s the basic question of how brains evolve,” Hecht says. “And the more specific question, which is: What are the neural correlates of domestication? Surprisingly, we don’t know.” At least not yet.

Whatever she found could also provide insight into a few emerging theories. One, articulated in 2005 by anthropologist Brian Hare and psychologist Michael Tomasello, proposes that back in the day, some unusually plucky wolves began hanging around humans to scrounge for scraps, giving rise to a less timid subpopulation. Without fear holding them back, these proto-pooches could repurpose their existing social skills to understand and communicate with us. They self-domesticated. That’s the essence of a dog, Hare and Tomasello argue: reduced fearfulness enabling advanced social cognition, that uncanny ability to read our minds. They called the idea “the domestication hypothesis.”

The proof is that pups just get us, without any teaching. Chimpanzees, for instance, struggle to follow a pointing gesture, but most mutts understand it right away. That thing Chevy did—looking to McCuistion to solve his problem—is another example. He intuitively knew how to ask for help.

In the sulci and peduncles of fox brains, Hecht might see signs of whether this theory or others hit the mark. She emailed Trut, who sent a few dozen specimens from recent generations of the Russian foxes, and used MRI to measure the relative size and shape of various structures in their brains.

Hecht saw changes in the parts of the limbic system and prefrontal cortex involved in emotions and social behavior. These data could support the “domestication hypothesis” but don’t rule out other competing ideas either. This initial finding mostly confirms that the brain regions you’d expect to be different are, in fact, different. So, for a finer-grained picture, Harvard postdoc Christina Rogers Flattery is adding another dimension to the analysis, shaving the fox brains into tissuethin slices and staining them with a dye that reveals their neurochemistry. She’s looking at the pathways of neurons that make the neurohormone vasopressin and at a serotonin subsystem, both of which are linked to aggression. She’s also investigating cells that make oxytocin, which promotes social bonding. There are many possible neural modifications that could lead to tame

behavior, such as the boosting of circuits involved in social bonding, or the tamping down of systems that trigger violent attacks. By weaving together Flattery’s investigation with brain scanning, plus genetic insights from a third collaborator, geneticist Anna Kukekova at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, the group might identify a Grand Unified Brain Theory of Tameness— or at least its neural-circuit diagram.

AS CHEVY RESPONDS TO HIS PROMPTS,

he’s representing not just himself, but also his breed. While we all have the sense that pit bulls and Pekingese and Irish wolfhounds have distinct personalities and skills, Hecht hopes to pin down those differences. It’s yet another way to explore how selective pressure—in this case, kennel-club propagation—shapes a brain. In a recent paper, Hecht analyzed MRI scans from 33 breeds, finding that, for instance, a Weimaraner’s noggin has extra terrain devoted to visual processing, and that of a basset hound is primed to analyze smells.

In that same paper, Hecht also looked at a Boston terrier’s brain, which was loaded up with networks related to social activity. Chevy seems to be no exception. Tests all done and DNA sample collected, he bursts into the waiting room, zipping around to greet each person individually, a tiny whirlwind of bliss and joy.

As the little guy gazes into each human’s eyes, little bursts of oxytocin likely erupt in his brain (and in each of our heads as well), findings from a 2015 study suggest. The hormone promotes bonding, which might be why canines are so good as therapy or emotional-support animals for P O P S C I.CO M / S P R I N G 2 0 2 0

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people who have survived trauma.

This swirl of friend-making ecstasy has inspired a rival origin theory that focuses on feelings rather than cognition: “their hearts, not their smarts,” in the words of Clive Wynne, behavioral scientist at Arizona State University. With collaborators Nicole Dorey and Monique Udell at the University of Florida and Oregon State University, respectively, Wynne proposes that the essence of dog identity has to do with emotional connections—love, to use a word rare in science.

“It’s kind of obvious, in a sense,” Wynne says.

“They’re amazingly affectionate. It’s just been avoided, in part, because it doesn’t sound serious enough to be a topic of investigation.”

The researchers happened upon this line of inquiry in 2008, when they set out to establish further proof for the “domestication hypothesis.”

But their head-to-head study of dogs and wolves found quite the opposite. Wellsocialized wolves from a research institute in Indiana easily followed human pointing gestures, while some shelter dogs who’d had little contact with people did not.

(Later studies showed that coyotes and even some handreared bats can do it too.)

Another surprise came from a simple test measuring the amount of time each canid hangs around a familiar person. Dogs stick close; wolves— even friendly hand-raised ones—don’t. Dogs, they reasoned, have a unique drive to bond, even with members of another species. Every pup is born with the capacity, including some 750 million stray “village dogs” worldwide. Incidentally, that ability to form interspecies bonds also explains why livestock breeds can be so vigilant guarding sheep or ducks.

More recently, Princeton University evolutionary biologist Bridgett vonHoldt discovered what might be the root of this affection. In the DNA of dogs, she and her team found a marker of evolutionary pressure on chromosome 6. In humans, equivalent mutations cause Williams-Beuren syndrome, a developmental disorder that leads to indiscriminate friendliness, or hypersociability. “I like to think that, in a very positive, adoring fashion, maybe dogs have the canine version of the syndrome,” she says. Here too the change initially arose in them, rather than through something we humans intentionally did.

Exactly how a few gene changes could transform a canid or a human into everyone’s BFF is unclear, and for unknown reasons, the tendency is stronger in some dogs—cough, Labrador retrievers—than others. In one of Hecht’s tests, known as the “empathy task,” experimenter McCuistion pretends to smash her thumb with a hammer, yelping as if in pain. Some animal subjects leap into the person’s lap, licking the faux wound. Chevy pretty much ignores her.

Nonetheless, studies of different kinds of canines raised under identical conditions hint that neither hypersociability nor social-cognition theories like the “domestication hypothesis” answer every question. Starting a decade ago, teams at the

DOGS H AV E A UNIQU E DRIV E TO BON D, EV EN WITH M EM BERS OF A NOTH ER SPECIES.

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Stockholm University and the University of Veterinary Medicine, Vienna’s Wolf Science Center began raising groups of dogs and wolves in the lab.

In their first months, both sets of puppies are with people 24 hours a day; after that, the animals live in packs with extensive human companionship.

These experiments indicate that dogs aren’t just wolves with better social skills. For one thing, hand-raised wolves are quite affable; they happily greet their caretakers and will go for walks on a lead. In 2020, the Stockholm team noted, to their surprise, that a few of their puppies intuitively comprehend “fetch” gestures, just like dogs do.

In fact, research out of the Wolf Science Center has found that in some situations, these wild animals are actually more tolerant than dogs: Given food to share, dogs keep their distance from one another. Wolves bicker and snarl at first, then eat peacefully side by side. In one study, pairs of wolves or dogs must cooperate to retrieve a piece of meat; wolves work together effectively, but dogs were “abysmally bad,” says investigator Sarah Marshall-Pescini. When she

DOGS: A LOVE STORY

tested wolf-human and dog-human cooperation partners, the pattern became clearer. Wolves aren’t afraid to take the lead, while dogs hang back and wait for a human to make the first move.

These unexpected findings led Marshall-Pescini toward yet a third theory of self-domestication: Maybe the shift wasn’t a new social skill or expression of love, but rather a novel conflict-management strategy. Humans probably would’ve killed bold, assertive wolves as a threat. But they might have tolerated deferential, avoidant proto-dogs skulking around the camp, hoping for a handout. (Aggressive varieties are probably a recent phenomenon, the result of dog fanciers in the 18th and 19th centuries who created nearly all modern breeds.)

Her group is looking at village dogs to understand more about canine social structure and how they respond to humans. Compared with our pets, these free-ranging animals are probably far more similar to the early dogs that were their long-ago ancestors—some friendly, some shy, all of them in an uneasy, ambivalent relationship with the hairless apes they rely on to survive.

LURKING AROUND THE EDGES OF THIS

research, like some wolf sneaking beyond the campfire, is the idea that we too may have domesticated ourselves. That’s one reason Hecht hopes to find a signature of tameness; if she does, she can look for the same pattern in the brains of house cats as compared with wild ones, and in our gray matter in contrast to apes. Anthropologist Hare’s version of this account of human origins, “survival of the friendliest,” posits that just like dogs, we became more trusting and tolerant of one

another in our long-ago past, which in turn allowed us to develop superskills in communication— language is one obvious example.

The notion of human self-domestication has bumped around at least since Darwin’s time, but today there’s actually evidence, points out primatologist Richard Wrangham of Harvard’s Department of Human Evolutionary Biology.

In addition to our unusual (for primates) tolerance of strangers and our long adolescence, we show some of the physical traits associated with domestication syndrome. Compared with our hominid relatives, we have shortened faces and smaller teeth. In 2014, Wrangham and collaborators even proposed a possible biological mechanism in neural crest cells, which help shape many of those body parts during embryonic development. The implication, as implausible as it might seem in these times, is that our species evolved to get along peaceably with one another.

In December 2019, a European group found that the gene BAZ1B, located in the Williams-Beuren region, influences facial shape by directing such cells. It could explain part of the human self-domestication story, Wrangham says.

Back in Hecht’s lab, a new volunteer named Coda runs through his tests. (Coincidentally, he’s also a Boston terrier.) For one task, McCuistion places a treat on the floor, says, “No! Don’t take it!” and then closes her eyes. Dogs know what eyes closed means, so at this point, most snatch the treat. Not Coda. As his owner points out, he’s always a very good boy. He sneaks a look at it, licks his lips, then stares glumly into space, waiting, deferring, and avoiding conflict, as is his dogly destiny.

Over on the other side of the one-way mirror, the humans are entirely absorbed in this drama.

“Goooood boy,” someone says. Even after McCuistion finally gives him permission to eat the snack, he still stands there looking sadly at her. A chorus erupts in the waiting room: “C’mon, Coda, take it!” We can all see his desire, feel his restraint. It’s enough to make you wonder who, exactly, evolved to read whose mind.

To look upon a dog, even through a one-way mirror, is to look upon our own species as well—what it takes to live in harmony, to understand one another, to replace fear and aggression with love and loyalty. Perhaps that is why dogs are so thoroughly delightful. They are a living reminder of a better version of ourselves. His afternoon of psychological prodding over, Coda takes the treat and shakes himself. His owner comes into the room, and he leaps up onto her lap, panting happily, staring deep into her eyes as she looks directly into his.

P O P S C I.CO M / S P R I N G 2 0 2 0

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no one knows why we sleep as told to Claire Maldarelli

JAMIE M. ZEITZER, P R O F E S S O R O F P S Y C H I AT R Y AT S TA N F O R D U N I V E R S I T Y ’ S CENTER FOR SLEEP SCIENCES

As a sleep researcher, one of the most common questions I’m asked is how to get a better night’s rest. That’s a challenging inquiry to answer. Many of us in the field began studying the subject because we are

so terrible at it in practice. And despite decades of study, we still don’t totally understand what sleep is—or why our ancestors first started doing it.

All vertebrates alive today have a form of slumber. So do some invertebrates like fruit flies and sea slugs. You can trace restfulness back to singlecelled organisms that split their time between periods of quiescence and bursts of activity. In some ways, sleep is just a state of inactivity. But there’s something unique about it that we haven’t figured out.

Despite what our fitness trackers might tell us, we don’t yet know what

mix of deep, light, and REM—the three stages of sleep—translates into the best rest. People obsess over these numbers, but they aren’t actionable.

With so much left to learn about the purpose of repose, it’s no wonder we can’t quantify it. Unfortunately, I’ve also found, in my research and personal habits, that most sleeping problems stick around. Once you’ve had trouble getting your z’s, you’ll be susceptible to that same issue again.

The irony, of course, is that the less you worry about your rest, the better it will be. Given my profession, I sort of set myself up for failure there.

TALES FROM THE

SPRING 2020 / POPSCI.COM

authenticating the grand slam of baseball cards

not an experienced grader,

JOE ORLANDO, PRESIDENT AND CEO OF COLLECTOR’S UNIVERSE

When a card arrives at our office, we first make sure it’s real, then assess its condition on a scale of 1 to 10. Because copies have sold for millions at auction, the Wagner used to be a popular target for forgeries. These are easy to spot: Up close, modern printing patterns look much different than the old methods. It also helps to have in-depth knowledge on what the collectible should look like. For example, a 1948

per, minuscule dents produce tiny shadows. We also measure the centering of the printing. Companies always cut individual pieces from larger sheets.

So with older print runs, the closer to the edge a card was, the more likely the factory would cut it crooked. Those that are centered properly will grade higher than skewed ones. So far, we haven’t seen a perfect-10 T206 Wagner—but one did manage a near-mint 8.

don’t fret about 10,000 steps I-MIN LEE, EPIDEMIOLOGIST AT H A R VA R D U N I V E R S I T Y S C H O O L O F P U B L I C H E A LT H

as told to Claire Maldarelli 104

A few years ago, my workplace had a competition where we all got fitness trackers, formed teams, and raced to accumulate the most overall steps. Many people were taken aback when they found they weren’t easily reaching the coveted 10,000 strides—a number most wellness apps promote as a standard for good, even optimal, health. I have studied the role that physical activity plays in preventing disease for a long time, and it made me wonder: Where did that number come from?

It turns out that in 1965, a Japanese

as told to Stan Horaczek

The T206 Honus Wagner baseball card is the ultimate find for collectors. It was part of a limited-edition series issued in tobacco packs between 1909 and 1911.

Production of Wagner’s T206 reportedly stopped early, so it’s the rarest of the bunch. There are somewhere between 50 and 75 of them in the world— depending on who you ask— and 33 have come through our company for authentication and grading.

company called Yamasa Clock created a personal-fitness pedometer called the Manpo-kei, which means “10,000 steps meter.” The Japanese character for 10,000 looks almost like a person walking or running, which is likely how the gadget-maker landed on the name—and the number. It’s also an easy goal to remember, especially when accompanied by a sketch of a person who’s literally walking.

But that benchmark wasn’t based on any scientific evidence. Even today, few studies have looked at the connection between steps taken and overall health. After my work competition, I decided to do my own research.

I found that in older women, half that number of footfalls—4,400—still lowered their risk of death, and that the benefit tapered off at around 7,500.

There’s still more work to do with different age groups, but it’s safe to say that 10,000 is no magic number.

TALES FROM THE FIELD

SPRING 2020 / POPSCI.COM

as told to Ellen Airhart

why we look the way we do

1. DESIGNED FOR SMIZING

2. A BREATH OF WARM AIR

3. FROM FINS TO FINGERS

4. HEARING EVERY LAST NOTE

5. THESE KNEES WERE MADE FOR WALKING

DANIEL LIEBERMAN,

ARSLAN ZAIDI, EVOLU-

T E T S U YA N A K A M U R A ,

A N D R E A S T R E I T,

TERENCE CAPELLINI,

HUMAN EVOLUTIONARY

TIONARY GENETICIST

EVOLUTIONARY

D E V E L O P M E N TA L

HUMAN EVOLUTIONARY

B I O L O G I S T AT

AT T H E U N I V E R S I T Y

D E V E L O P M E N TA L

NEUROBIOLOGIST

B I O L O G I S T AT

HARVARD UNIVERSITY

O F P E N N S Y LV A N I A

B I O L O G I S T AT

AT K I N G ’ S

HARVARD UNIVERSITY

The area that surrounds the iris—called the sclera—is tinted in most animals but bright white in humans. This allows us to see where others direct their gazes, enabling crucial silent communication like eye rolls and sideways glances.

Climate likely plays a role in how noses formed. Our schnozzes filter air to make it warm and moist for our lungs. Wider nostrils prevent overheating, while narrow nasal holes more easily moisturize frigid, dry air.

Evolution had to strike a balance.

RUTGERS UNIVERSITY

COLLEGE LONDON

At some point in the course of animal evolution, small bones in fish fin rays became the relatively larger ones that make up human fingers and wrists. Our lab found each very different appendage actually contained the same exact type of cells.

The ear’s visible folds capture nearby noise, but tiny hair cells inside help turn that seized sound into recognizable audio. They are fragile, though. Unlike fishes and birds, when ours (and all mammals’) get damaged, they are ruined for good.

It’s not easy to find an efficient way to walk on two legs.

Once we landed on a shinbone, knee, and thigh bone configuration that worked, we stuck with it. Everyone complains about knee pain. Evolution made something optimal, but it did not make it everlasting.

106

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i let bedbugs feast on me—for science ROBERTO PEREIRA, ENTOMOLOGIST AT T H E U N I V E R S I T Y O F F L O R I D A

PAT R I C K M C G O V E R N , S C I E N T I F I C D I R E C T O R O F THE BIOMOLECULAR ARCHAEOLOGY PROJECT AT T H E U N I V E R S I T Y O F P E N N S Y LV A N I A M U S E U M

as told to Eleanor Cummins 108

I’ve had a fascination with beer for a long time.

I had my first one in Bavaria in 1961 when I was 16. It was legal there, but when I got back to New York, the drinking age was 18. One time, I wanted a pint so badly, I dressed in lederhosen, went to a nearby tavern, and pretended I was German. It worked—they actually served me.

I began studying alcoholic beverages in the 1990s at the University of Pennsylvania Museum, where I now direct the Biomolecular Archaeology Project. My colleagues and I had been researching the design and engineering of ancient pottery, but inevitably we started to wonder what had been inside those jugs.

Around that time, an archaeologist working in Iran brought us a roughly 5,500-year- old vessel with an unusual residue inside. It looked like calcium oxalate: a yellowish, crystalline residue that modern brewers call “beerstone.” It can harbor microorganisms that may warp a batch’s flavor or even be poisonous.

When we compared the residue with a sample from a local brewery, they were virtually identical. Combined with the fact that the crisscrossed lines on the container matched those of the Sumerian symbol for beer (kaş), we were confident that we had found the oldest-known evidence of draft production.

New discoveries always pop up. In 2018, a team in Israel found a 13,000-year-old receptacle with potential brewing evidence. I think beer goes back to our species’ beginnings. If sugars were there to ferment, humans were probably trying to get that buzz I felt back in Bavaria.

In 2007, I started a position at the urban entomology lab at the University of Florida. At the time, bedbugs were spreading around the United States—after a long period of quiescence—so a lot of research was focused on understanding and controlling the insects.

Bedbugs are ancient critters with diets made up entirely of blood. Before they developed their taste for humans, they dwelled in caves and fed on bats.

When our species moved into the caves, we became one of their main meal sources. Eventually we gave them a free ride to our more-modern residences.

They’ve had millennia to get to know us. To become scientifically acquainted with them, we needed to collect the bugs in the field and recolonize them in

the lab, where we could scrutinize their behaviors.

My colleagues and I visited homes heavily infested with the common bedbug, Cimex lectularius. Once, however, we found a small infestation of a far rarer variety in the US: tropical bedbugs, or C. hemipterus, whose behavior we know less about. We needed to boost their numbers in the lab to effectively study them, which meant we had to feed them. You can put rabbit blood inside paraffin film to mimic skin, but bedbugs can have trouble biting it. Instead, I put their cage on my arm or leg and just let them feed for a bit. It gets uncomfortable when you have around 100 on your skin, but I can’t ask my students to do it. It’s far more ethical to ask myself— and I’m very agreeable.

as told to Kat Eschner

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TALES FROM THE FIELD

as told to Charlie Wood

a picture worth a billion light-years C H U C K B E N N E T T, P R O F E S S O R OF PHYSICS AND ASTRONOMY AT J O H N S H O P K I N S U N I V E R S I T Y

A book I read in high school by Isaac Asimov opened my eyes to the big bang’s afterglow. It said that researchers had discovered this light that could have come from the explosion. My jaw dropped. In graduate school, I joined a team mapping the stuff with a satellite.

Later on, I led a similar mission.

Normal photographs capture light

that bounces off the subject a fraction of a second before reaching the lens.

Our picture was based on photons that streamed from the cosmos when its earliest clouds cleared, around 375,000 years after the big bang.

Physicists call these particles “cosmic microwave background” (CMB). They took billions of years to reach us. Today they exist everywhere, but the universe’s expansion stretched them into microwaves that the human eye can’t detect.

Pictures of the cosmos’s first light helped us establish our origin story. By 2003, my team had calculated that the universe was 13.8 billion years old and appeared almost perfectly flat.

Now even more information is being gathered. The CMB has been incredibly valuable, and we’re not done yet.

SPRING 2020 / POPSCI.COM

switching hands WILLIAM HOPKINS, PROFESSOR

much bigger actions like throwing.

O F C O M PA R AT I V E M E D I C I N E AT THE UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS MD ANDERSON CANCER CENTER

aren’t born with a dominant side. On

as told to Sara Kiley Watson

Lefties are an oddity among humans. Only about 1 in 9 of us use that hand, but my research on primates has found that in bonobos and chimps, the split is more even: About 1 in 3 default left. For orangutans, 2 in 3 individuals are left-handed.

When I first started working with chimp colonies, I was mostly recording the mitts they used for tools. But some of them, perhaps out of frustration, would aggressively hurl poop at me. I remember thinking that if I’m going to

think their echoes still influence us.

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Karen James Is a noted journalist who specializes in relationships, romance, and sex

Ask The Expert

Love, Marriage, and

Aging Well!

Men in Italy Don’t Need Viagra.

Now We Know Why… A Secret Any Man Can Use! This month I got a letter from a reader in Texas about a “little secret” that has renewed her love life with her husband!

Tina writes: Dear Karen,

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or years my husband and I had a wonderful love life, but when he reached his 50s, he really slowed down and lost some of his old spark, especially in the bedroom. For the past few years, it’s felt like we were roommates, not husband and wife..

Well, last month he came home from a business trip in Europe and shocked me with more energy and passion than he’s had in years. He took me in the bedroom like we were newlyweds and gave me a night I’ll never forget.

It was just incredible, and our love life has been like that ever since. So here we are, closer and more intimate than ever... in our 50’s!

“My husband shocked me with more energy and passion than he’s had in years. He took me in the bedroom like we were newlyweds and gave me a night I’ll never forget!” sexual nutrients. They will give you back all the vigor and passion you had as a young man.” Then he laughed and said, “You will become an Italian Stallion – like me!”

Provarin, these pure plant extracts have a legendary reputation throughout Europe. As Giovanni from Milan put it, “It’s like bedroom rocket fuel – especially for us older guy!”

Karen, my husband is back to the man I fell in love with. He’s full energy, beaming with confidence, and his desire for me is through the roof – I love it! But now the pack is almost empty and we On his trip, he stayed next to an older, both desperately want more. Do you but very energetic Italian couple. Every know about these European tablets and day he’d see them out riding bikes or playing tennis. If that wasn’t enough, the can we get them in the States?

Sincerely, were just as “energetic” at night. Let’s just say the hotel walls were paper thin... Tina D., Fort Worth, TX

All-natural and safe to take, Provarin is a well-kept secret for those in the know.

An old-school, family business, they still harvest product by hand and don’t do any advertising. Long-time customers and word of mouth ensures their limited stock is sold out every year.

Envious, one morning at breakfast he asked how they stayed so “active.”.

Instead of being embarrassed that they’d been found out, they were positively glowing and happy to share their “secret.” The man pulled out a small pack from his leather satchel, gave it to my husband and said “these tablets come from a small town up north and are made from naturally pure extracts, packed with densely rick

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Milled on the fertile northern plains, and sold under the brand name

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stairs that start nowhere

BY S A R A K I L EY WAT S O N ILLUSTRATION BY ST UA RT PAT I E N C E

GLANCE AT THE STAIRS ABOVE.

Find the base...rather, spot the top. Upon closer examination, you’ll realize that there is no beginning or end. There’s no way that’s feasible, right?

These familiar steps, called the Penrose stairs, are a type of “impossible object”—a construction that could not exist in reality even though its individual pieces look totally valid, says Erez Freud, a cognitive neuroscientist at York University in Toronto. The paradoxical item takes form when the brain attempts to turn a 2D image into a 3D object.

From years of trusted experience, our noggins assume lines are always straight and corners precisely 90 degrees. But those facts can’t be true

and still create this eternal four-way staircase. You can’t walk upstairs forever, especially in a loop. Normally, two regions in the brain’s visual cortex—the ventral visual pathway and the dorsal visual pathway—communicate to identify objects and place them in space. With impossible objects like the stairs above, those two pathways in your gray matter fire back and forth more than usual, trying to come to a conclusion. But they can’t, resulting in an uneasy feeling.

The key to this scene is perspective—it works only in 2D. If you saw these steps in real life, and viewed them from any other angle, you’d uncover what you always suspected: a gap between two sections.

In other words, a staircase like any other.

P O P S C I.CO M / S P R I N G 2 0 2 0

113

the original illusions

BY J E S S R O M E O ILLUSTRATION BY

I L LU S I O N S H AV E FA S C I N AT E D H U M A N S F O R centuries. Before we fully understood the science of sensation and perception, philosophers like Aristotle simply observed the world— and picked up on some weird stuff. According to Vincent Hayward, who studies such phenomena at the Institute for Intelligent Systems and Robotics in Paris, these tricks occur when experience and context make you expect one feeling but perceive another due to abnormal circumstances. Here are three of Aristotle’s earliest observed illusions, explained by modern science.

L E NA VA RG A S

2

3 1

1/Waterfall illusion While watching a moving river, Aristotle noticed that when he shifted his attention to stationary rocks, they wiggled upstream.

Neurons that process motion tire after focusing on the same activity. When struck with a still object, cells that track movement in the opposite direction have a stronger impact in comparison, and send it swimming away.

114

S P R I N G 2 0 2 0 / P O P S C I.CO M

2/Afterimages After staring directly at the sun (not recommended), Aristotle saw a glowing disc shaped like our local star in his vision for a few lingering moments. When you fixate on something, color receptors in your eyes become overstimulated. Upon looking away, those receptors keep firing and create an imprint, or afterimage, of that object everywhere you look.

3/Aristotle’s illusion Close your eyes and hold any rounded object like your nose or a pen (Aristotle may have used a pea) between two crossed fingers.

The resulting sensation feels like two separate objects. Your noggin isn’t used to the opposite sides of your fingers touching the same thing. Without your sight to set you straight, the brain assumes it’s touching two different items.

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is this the world’s first illusion?

BY

T O M M C NA M A R A

C A R V E D

ornament was fixed on a hunting tool more than 14,000 years ago, but the illusion remains. Concentrate on the higher eye- shaped notch on the left side, and a tusk curves below it, revealing a mammoth. Stare at the one lower down, and that pointed tooth becomes a bison’s horn as the beast bows its head. You might recall a similar 19th- century illustration: It’s a duck until the bird’s bill morphs into a pair of rabbit’s ears.

The rabbit-duck is a type of illusion called an ambiguous figure, and while we can’t know the ancient carver’s intent, this prehistoric knickknack

is one too. According to Kyle Mathewson, a cognitive neuroscientist at the University of Alberta, the flip- flopping happens because the mammoth and bison share the same basic outlines. Your brain’s visual cortex makes sense of this low-level information, and then hands it off to a set of high-level processing neurons, which parses features like fur or tusks. This way, two different results stem from the same set of lines. Mammoth, bison; tomato, tomahto.

LEFT TO RIGHT: DUNCAN CALDWELL; FROM FLIEGENDE BLÄTTER, OCTOBER 23, 1892

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there’s always another way in BY

J E S S I CA B O D DY

H U M A N S H AV E M E A N D E R E D

GLENN ORZEPOWSKI

through mazes for thousands of years, whether they be ancient Egyptian labyrinths, a Minotaur’s lair, passageways carved in cornfields, or horrifying hedges in Stephen King’s The Shining. Each puzzle’s objective is simple: Navigate through winding corridors and dead ends to reach the finish—that could mean you emerge on the other side, or sit soundly at its center. In the maze on the right, three distinct routes, each originating from a different entryway, will guide you to the middle. Can you traverse them all? (Answers are on page 118.)

RUN WILD, RUN FREE

To keep the momentum going, American Rivers is working with public agencies and private organizations to bring down dozens more dams throughout New England, and restore riparian habitats across the nation.

Meanwhile, the Army Corps of Engineers is considering the future of two dams at St. Anthony Falls, where the Mississippi River flows through Minneapolis. Authorities hope to breach four others on the Klamath River in Northern California within the next few years, a move that would reclaim 300 miles of salmon-spawning habitat.

Major projects like that attract a lot of attention, but the cumulative impact of many moremodest removal plans could yield equally profound ecological and economic dividends. “You can get a lot of species recovery and

some very diverse ecosystem recovery with much-smaller sledgehammers,” Doyle, the Duke University hydrologist, says. Now that the usefulness of these man-made barriers has run its course, it is time to let the rivers they restrain return to theirs.

archaeology while being a little skeptical of the purposes to which it’s being put.” In the first act of a 2019 performance that dealt with those issues, Logan knocked the project’s PR department for casting the rail as a bonanza for discovery: “Is archaeology really a profession we want to run on a bonanza basis?”

In the era of developer-led digging, that’s a question practitioners are reckoning with too. Costain archaeologist Raynor, whose focus now turns from St. James’s to the 15 miles of track leading out of Euston Station, would at least agree that her profession lacks sustainability. According to Darvill, half of archaeologists work in jobs tied to construction.

Bonanza-like conditions also create a gold rush of information—a blessing and a curse. With overstuffed basements, museums around the world face a storage crisis, and more digging might only compound the problem, especially now that archaeologists consider sites as recent as World War II worthy of study. Raynor sees

the management of all that information as the bigger challenge—not just for scientific analysis, but also for public consumption.

The excavation at St. James’s alone generated 3.5 terabytes of data. “It loses meaning if you don’t communicate it,” she says.

Luckily, communication is the easier piece of the puzzle. In Raynor’s experience, people viscerally react to pots, bowls, tools, and other bric-a-brac from the past. “As human beings, our wants, needs, and desires haven’t changed that much,” she says.

While the saga of HS2 is still being written, those small finds might resonate as much with the public as the discoveries of icons, like Matthew Flinders, whose life stories are embedded in the UK’s ever-changing stratigraphy. Flinders himself wouldn’t recognize Euston Station today, nor would he have thought he’d be an interesting scientific specimen. For better or worse, he helped chart a course through history, only to find himself in its path.

ANSWER KEY FOR PG 117

offshore, a long line of floats marking the location of traps runs parallel to the beach. The operation provided an unexpected economic boost.

Of the 1,605 dams toppled nationwide since 1912, the two on the Elwha remain the largest, according to the advocacy organization American Rivers. Some 1,200 have come down in 46 states and the District of Columbia in the two decades after the Interior Department’s Babbitt, who led the agency under President Bill Clinton, made river restoration a priority. In 1999, the Edwards Dam in Augusta, Maine, became the first major hydroelectric dam razed by the federal government. The structure, built in 1837 to power bygone grain mills along the Kennebec River, nearly killed off the herring, striped bass, and sturgeon. Today the waterway draws sport fishers, and the city gained a popular riverfront district with a park, pavilion, and kayak and canoe launch.

(CONTINUED FROM P. 61)

B I G G E S T. D I G . E V E R .

with what has become an increasingly unpopular infrastructure project. Prime Minister Boris Johnson ordered a review to determine whether the rail should be scrapped because of ballooning costs and delays. Critics argue that the benefits won’t outweigh the environmental disruption, the land seizures, and the financial burden to taxpayers. The community around Euston Station protested the construction, which gouged a green space, and leveled homes, offices, and hotels, displacing longtime residents who complained about shoddy compensation. The vicar of a nearby church even chained herself to a tree.

In such a controversial effort, any incidental cultural benefits are bound to conjure a degree of suspicion. “I’m fascinated by the stories that the dig at St. James’s Gardens is helping to bring to light,” says Brian Logan, the artistic director of the Camden People’s Theater, located at the doorstep of the site.

“But I think you can be enthusiastic about

(CONTINUED FROM P. 93)

118

S P R I N G 2 0 2 0 / P O P S C I.CO M

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BEHIND THE COVER BY

S A R A K I L EY WAT S O N

/ PHOTOGRAPHS BY

T H E VO O R H E S

• What came first: the chicken or the egg? When it comes to making our cover, at least, the egg wins. Specifically, 15 wooden nesting dolls ranging in size from a tiny thimble to a Starbucks venti latte. Robin Finlay, the prop-styling half of photography duo The Voorhes, sanded and painted the pieces again and again until they’d appear as smooth as the real deal in front of the camera. Then, using a special laser, she emblazoned a lucky four (two big and two medium) with foul and eggs. Because the tool was designed for perfectly round cylinders and surfaces, she had to secure the eggs in a home-brewed vise fashioned from two sections of PVC pipe. To create the final image containing dozens of the oblongs, photographer Adam Voorhes stitched together 21 frames and digitally overlaid the designs onto all the other un-lasered eggs—even the wee ones—stretching into infinity in an endless march of chicken-versus-egg.

POPULAR SCIENCE magazine, Vol. 292, No. 1 (ISSN 161-7370, USPS 577-250), is published quarterly by Bonnier Corp., 2 Park Ave., New York, NY 10016. Copyright ©2020 by Bonnier Corp. All rights reserved. Reprinting in whole or part is forbidden except by permission of Bonnier Corp. POSTMASTER: Send address changes to POPULAR SCIENCE, P.O. Box 6364, Harlan, IA 51593-1864. Periodicals postage paid at New York, NY, and additional mailing offices. Subscription Rates: $25 for one year for US addresses; $35 for one year for Canadian addresses; $45 for one year for all other international addresses. Canada Post Publications agreement No. 40612608. Canada Return Mail: IMEX Global Solutions, P.O. Box 25542, London, ON N6C 6B2. Printed in the USA. Subscriptions processed electronically. Subscribers: If the post office alerts us that your magazine is undeliverable, we have no further obligation unless we receive a corrected address within two years. Photocopy Permission: Permission is granted by POPULAR SCIENCE for libraries and others registered with the Copyright Clearance Center (CCC) to photocopy articles in this issue for the flat fee of $1 per copy of each article or any part of an article. Send correspondence and payment to CCC (21 Congress St., Salem, MA 01970); specify CCC code 0161-7370/85/$1.00–0.00.

Copying done for other than personal or reference use without the written permission of POPULAR SCIENCE is prohibited. Address requests for permission on bulk orders to POPULAR SCIENCE, 2 Park Ave., New York, NY 10016 for foreign requests. Editorial Offices: Address contributions to POPULAR SCIENCE, Editorial Dept., 2 Park Ave., New York, NY 10016. We are not responsible for loss of unsolicited materials; they will not be returned unless accompanied by return postage. Microfilm editions are available from Xerox University Microfilms Serial Bid Coordinator, 300 N. Zeeb Rd., Ann Arbor, MI 48106.

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S P R I N G 2 0 2 0 / P O P S C I.CO M