Ever since I can remember, I was constantly asking questions. My parents called me “Miss Inquisity” because of it. I was that quirky kid on the playground who played with butterflies and spied for ladybugs. After I came home from school, I binged How It’s Made on the Science Channel. Oh, that’s what makes my bubble gum so sticky!Or, this is what they put in Oreos, really? I thought to myself. Seeing all this, you’d think that STEM would be the perfect fit for me, right? For a long time, I thought so too. My initial impressions of the field were that it would satisfy my unrelenting desire to know why. But as I grew up, this only seemed farther from the truth.
In high school, when I finally had the academic freedom to explore my interests, I took full advantage. Planning my own classes, I loaded up on every science course I could find. Chemistry, biology, you name it, and it was on my schedule. Though I wasn’t sure exactly what it was I wanted to pursue in STEM yet, I hoped that these courses would help me find out. Come junior year, I was still undecided and even more concerned because it was supposedly the hardest point of high school. I had some of the most difficult classes on my agenda. AP chemistry, precalculus AB—most of my peers would barely give these a second glance. But once I started studying the material, I finally understood why they held back, why I consistently heard so many of my friends ask “When am I ever going to use this?” or “When is this ever going to help me?”
Much to my disappointment, the reality of studying these “hard sciences” is far removed from the way it is shown in the media—unlike anything I’d seen in watching all those episodes of How It’s Made. When you have so many formulas, constants and theorems to memorize, it is far too easy to get lost in the complexity of it all. After all, how motivating is it to remember a bunch of numbers when you don’t really know why it even matters to use them? And trust me when I say I completely empathize! It is hard.
This is why I nearly give up on pursuing STEM. I clearly remember a moment in AP chemistry, reviewing the basics of elemental composition, when I asked myself, Why do I even need to know this, what is the point of it all? I was drumming my mechanical pencil on the table for five minutes straight, stumped on this one problem, and barely had the stamina to continue. Thankfully, the assignment wasn’t due till a week later when I finally had the wake-up call I never knew I needed.
I didn’t expect to have such a breakthrough in my AP psychology class, but it was Ms. Brown’s unique approach to instruction that made me reconsider the idea of throwing it all away—my desire to pursue STEM, that is. She forewarned us that neuroscience was one of the more challenging units this year, and after my recent fallout with chemistry, I honestly wasn’t looking forward to it.
After she gave our class a brief overview of the unit, she immediately divided us into Zoom breakout rooms to analyze real-world scenarios using neuroscience terminology. I remember one in particular about a man who suffered cerebral trauma in a car accident and couldn’t feel any pain. She surprised us by popping into our room, waiting patiently for an answer. I always hated the awkward silence, and for no other reason than to just break the tension I quipped “Well, the adrenal gland of the endocrine system releases adrenaline, decreasing sensation to pain, allowing the man to feel temporarily stronger, taking control of his situation.” She commended my participation and lightly scolded the students with their cameras turned off as she left the room.
I think I might like this, I thought to myself.Shortly, one of my peers unmuted and said “Wow, you’re really good at this!” But at the time, I didn’t think it was so much my skill, as much as how I loved that neuroscience had reignited my passion for discovering the why. What makes people happy, biologically, what is really going on? What factors in our brains are conspiring to create a certain thought, reaction or emotion? But even more than these provocative questions was the idea that there is still so much we don’t know about the brain—meaning just that much more for me to discover!
So, if you really want to know why more young people aren’t entering STEM, I hope you’ll remember this story. While I may not have a concrete answer, I do have my experiences, and, knowing why—where your learning is going to take you—is one powerful feeling.
This is an opinion and analysis article; the views expressed by the author or authors are not necessarily those of Scientific American.
NASA is considering whether to rename its flagship astronomical observatory, given reports alleging that James Webb, after whom it is named, was involved in persecuting gay and lesbian people during his career in government. Keeping his name on the US$8.8-billion James Webb Space Telescope (JWST)—set to launch later this year—would glorify bigotry and anti-LGBT+ sentiment, say some astronomers. But others say there is not yet enough evidence against Webb, who was head of NASA from 1961 to 1968, and they are withholding judgement until the agency has finished an internal investigation.
The JWST, which will peer into the distant reaches of the cosmos, is NASA’s biggest astronomical project in decades, so the stakes are high. In May, citing Webb’s purported involvement in discrimination, four prominent astronomers launched a petition to change the telescope’s name. It has amassed 1,250 signatories, including scientists who have been awarded observing time on the telescope.
NASA’s acting chief historian, Brian Odom, is working with a non-agency historian to review archival documents about Webb’s policies and actions, according to agency officials. Only after the investigation concludes will NASA decide what to do.
“We must make a conscious decision,” Paul Hertz, head of NASA’s astrophysics division, told an agency advisory committee on 29 June. “We must be transparent with the community and with the public for the rationale for whichever decision we make.”
Searching the archives
Former NASA administrator Sean O’Keefe named the JWST after Webb in 2002, when the telescope was in the early stages of development. It was a unilateral decision that took many by surprise, because NASA’s telescopes are typically named after scientists. Webb, who died in 1992, was a bureaucrat who held several administrative roles in the US government.
O’Keefe chose the name because Webb had advocated that NASA keep science as a key part of its portfolio in the 1960s, even as the Apollo programme of human space exploration soaked up most of the agency’s attention and budget. O’Keefe tells Nature he was not aware of the accusations when he picked the name, and he supports keeping it unless more information surfaces. “Without James Webb’s leadership, there may have been no telescope or much of anything else at NASA noteworthy of a naming controversy,” he says.
As Webb was beginning his career with the US government in the late 1940s, gay and lesbian employees were being systematically rooted out and fired because of their sexual orientation—a campaign encouraged by several prominent members of Congress. The period is known as the lavender scare, echoing the anti-Communist ‘red scare’ with which it was often intertwined. During the lavender scare, gay people were cast, untruthfully, as perverts who might be desperate to keep their sexual orientation secret and thus be susceptible to revealing government secrets under blackmail. Its epicentre was the Department of State, which handles foreign policy.
The four astronomers leading the renaming petition say that when Webb worked for the state department in the high-ranking position of undersecretary from 1949 to 1952, he passed a set of memos discussing what was described as “the problem of homosexuals and sex perverts” to a senator who was leading the persecution. They point to records found in the US National Archives by astronomer Adrian Lucy at Columbia University in New York City. “The records clearly show that Webb planned and participated in meetings during which he handed over homophobic material,” the petition leaders wrote earlier this year in an opinion piece in Scientific American.
The four astronomers are Lucianne Walkowicz at the Adler Planetarium in Chicago, Illinois; Chanda Prescod-Weinstein at the University of New Hampshire in Durham; Brian Nord at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia, Illinois; and Sarah Tuttle at the University of Washington in Seattle. “We felt that we should take a public stand on naming such an important facility after someone whose values were so questionable,” they write in an e-mail to Nature. “It’s time for NASA to stand up and be on the right side of history.”
David Johnson, a historian at the University of South Florida in Tampa who wrote the 2004 book The Lavender Scare, says he knows of no evidence that Webb led or instigated persecution. Webb did attend a White House meeting on the threat allegedly posed by gay people, but the context of the meeting was to contain the hysteria that members of Congress were stirring up. “I don’t see him as having any sort of leadership role in the lavender scare,” says Johnson.
Walkowicz and their colleagues note that as a leader, Webb bore responsibility for discriminatory policies enacted at his agency. They also note the case of Clifford Norton, who was fired from his job at NASA because he was suspected to be gay in 1963, when Webb was NASA administrator. “We believe the known historical record speaks clearly in favour of renaming the telescope,” they say.
NASA has given no estimate of when its investigation might be complete. Odom says that the COVID-19 pandemic has limited historians’ access to archival records.
A reflection of values
The push to rename the telescope falls into the broader reckoning over naming buildings, facilities and other objects after questionable historical figures. Last year, an aerospace executive began an as-yet unsuccessful effort to rename a NASA centre in Mississippi that is named after John Stennis, a senator who voted repeatedly in favour of racial segregation in the 1960s. In the past year or so, NASA has tried to address past discrimination against Black scientists and against women by naming its Washington DC headquarters after Mary Jackson, the first Black female engineer at the agency, and announcing that the flagship space telescope after the JWST will be named after Nancy Grace Roman, NASA’s first chief astronomer.
The JWST debate comes near the end of a long and exhausting push to launch the observatory into space. Originally conceived in 1989 as the successor to the iconic Hubble Space Telescope, the craft is many years and billions of dollars over budget.
To some, the telescope’s potential to transform astronomy makes it even more important that the JWST carry a name that reflects modern values. “For me, it really comes down to what kind of message we want to send to the more junior folks and students in our field,” says Peter Gao, a planetary scientist at the University of California, Santa Cruz. “The people we choose to celebrate by naming our telescopes after them is a reflection of our values.”
The final decision lies with NASA administrator Bill Nelson, who has not said anything publicly on the matter. There is no clear list of alternative names, although many people have made unofficial suggestions. Walkowicz and the other astronomers who are leading the petition suggest Harriet Tubman, after the formerly enslaved woman who fought to end slavery in the United States in the nineteenth century and used the stars to guide Black people to freedom. Saurabh Jha, an astronomer at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey, suggests Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin, whose work revolutionized astronomers’ understanding of the composition of the Universe in the early twentieth century.
Some astronomers who plan to use the JWST are already thinking about what they will do if the telescope is not renamed. One idea is to acknowledge LGBT+ rights in the acknowledgements sections of papers published using JWST data, says Johanna Teske, an astronomer at the Carnegie Institution for Science in Washington DC.
Many are keen to see what the NASA investigation might unearth. “It’s important to look at what happened and what the facts are,” says Rolf Danner, an astronomer at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, who is chair of the American Astronomical Society’s committee on sexual orientation and gender minorities in astronomy. “And then really ask ourselves—would we make that choice again?”
This article is reproduced with permission and was first published on July 23 2021.
My quantum experiment, which has consumed me for more than a year now, has dredged up a creepy, long-buried memory. It dates back to the late 1970s, when I was a housepainter living in Denver. One day I found myself in a grungy saloon on Denver’s dusty eastern outskirts. Behind the bar was an aquarium with a single, nasty-looking fish hovering in it. A silver, saucer-sized, snaggle-toothed, milky-eyed, blind piranha.
Now and then, the bartender netted a few minnows from a fishbowl and dropped them into the piranha’s cubicle. The piranha froze for an instant, then darted this way and that, jaws snapping, as the minnows fled. The piranha kept bumping, with audible thuds, into the glass walls of its prison. That explained the protuberance on its snout, which resembled a tiny battering ram. Sooner or later the piranha gobbled all the hapless minnows, whereupon it returned to its listless, suspended state.
What does this poor creature have to do with quantum mechanics? Here’s what. Our modern scientific worldview and much of our technology—including the laptop on which I’m writing these words—is based on quantum principles. And yet a century after its invention, physicists and philosophers cannot agree on what quantum mechanics means. The theory raises deep and, I’m guessing, unanswerable questions about matter, mind and “reality,” whatever that is.
More than a half century ago, Richard Feynman advised us to accept that nature makes no sense. “Do not keep saying to yourself … ‘But how can [nature] be like that?’” Feynman warns in The Character of Physical Law, “because you will get ‘down the drain,’ into a blind alley from which nobody has yet escaped. Nobody knows how it can be like that.” Most physicists have followed Feynman’s advice. Ignoring the oddness of quantum mechanics, they simply apply it to accomplish various tasks, such as predicting new particles or building more powerful computers.
Another deep-thinking physicist, John Bell, deplored this situation. In his classic 1987 work Speakable and Unspeakable in Quantum Mechanics, Bell chides physicists who apply quantum mechanics while blithely disregarding its “fundamental obscurity”; he calls them “sleepwalkers.” But Bell acknowledges that efforts to “interpret” quantum mechanics so that it makes sense have failed. He likens interpretations such as the many-world hypothesis and pilot-wave theory to “literary fiction.”
Today, there are more interpretations than ever, but they deepen rather than dispel the mystery at the heart of things. The more I dwell on puzzles such as superposition, entanglement and the measurement problem, the more I identify with the piranha. I’m blindly thrashing about for insights, epiphanies, revelations. Every now and then I think I’ve grasped some slippery truth, but my satisfaction is always fleeting. Sooner or later, I end up crashing into an invisible barrier. I don’t really know where I am or what’s going on. I’m in the dark.
The main difference between me and piranha is that it is inside the aquarium, and I’m on the outside, looking in. I can take solace from the fact that my world is much bigger than the piranha’s, and that I know many things that the fish cannot. But it’s all too easy to imagine some enlightened, superintelligent being standing outside our world, looking at us with the same pity and smug superiority that we feel toward the piranha.
Plato presents himself as this enlightened being in his famous parable of the cave, which I make my freshman humanities classes read every semester. The parable describes people confined to a cave for their entire lives. They are prisoners, but they don’t know they are prisoners. An evil trickster behind them has built a fire, by means of which he projects shadows of everything from aardvarks to zebras onto the cave wall in front of the prisoners. The cave dwellers mistake these shadows for reality. Only by escaping the cave can the prisoners discover the brilliant, sunlit reality beyond it.
We are the benighted prisoners in the cave, and Plato, the enlightened philosopher, is trying to drag us into the light. But isn’t it possible, even probable, that Plato and other self-appointed saviors, who say they’ve seen the light and want us to see it too, are charlatans? Or loons? Given our profound capacity for self-deception, isn’t it likely that when you think you’ve left the cave, you’ve actually just swapped one set of illusions for another? These are the questions with which I torment my students. Here are some of their responses:
Clearly, some people are ignorant and deluded, like flat-earthers, and others are well-informed. So yes, we can and do escape the cave of ignorance by going to college and studying physics, chemistry, history, philosophy and so on. We can reduce our ignorance still further with the help of reliable news sources, such as the New York Times and Fox News, and traveling to other countries to learn how other people see the world.
Yes, we can escape the cave by studying physics and other fields, but we only end up in another cave, with equations projected on the walls instead of silhouettes of aardvarks and so on. The new cave may be more interesting, comfortable and better-illuminated than the cave we were in before, but it’s still a cave. Only a few rare souls experience ultimate reality, like Buddha, Jesus and Einstein.
Plato wasn’t really talking about worldly knowledge, he was talking about spiritual knowledge, or enlightenment. So yes, we can leave the cave and see the light of truth, but only by accepting the teachings of great sages such as Buddha, Moses, Jesus or Muhammad, and perhaps by practicing spiritual disciplines such as prayer and meditation.
With the help of philosophy, art, meditation and psychedelics, we can become more aware that we are in a cave, in a state of illusion; we can know, sort of, what we don’t know. But no mere human ever escapes the cave, not even the greatest sages and scientists. Not even Plato, Stephen Hawking or L. Ron Hubbard. Only God, if there is a God, can perceive absolute truth. And maybe not even God.
Who cares if we’re in a cave or not? If we’re having fun, that’s all that matters. (Although only a few of my students have the courage to voice this option, I suspect it’s what many of them think, especially the business majors.)
To be honest, the fourth option—that not even God can escape the cave, plus the references to psychedelics, Stephen Hawking and L. Ron Hubbard—is mine. But my students come up with the other options on their own, with minimal prodding from me. By the time we’re done with this exercise, I start feeling guilty about rubbing the young, innocent faces of the non–business majors in the world’s inscrutability. To make them feel a little better, I bring up another possibility that usually doesn’t occur to them:
If we realize we’re in the cave, isn’t that the same, sort of, as escaping from it? Actually, if “ultimate reality” is inaccessible to us, isn’t that the same, sort of, as saying that it doesn’t exist? And hence that the cave, the world in which we live each and every day, is the one and only reality? And hence that the business majors are right, and we should just chill out and enjoy ourselves?
Maybe. On good days, I look out the window of my apartment at the shining Hudson River, crisscrossed by boats, and at the Manhattan skyline, a symbol of humanity’s ever-growing knowledge of and power over nature, and I think, Yes, this is reality, there is nothing else. But then I remember the quantum mist at the core of reality, which not even the smartest sages can penetrate, and to which most of us are oblivious. And I remember the piranha, bumping over and over again into the walls of its world, blind to its own blindness.
This is an opinion and analysis article; the views expressed by the author or authors are not necessarily those of Scientific American.
Further Reading:
Is the Schrödinger Equation True?
Quantum Mechanics, the Chinese Room Experiment and the Limits of Understanding
Quantum Mechanics, the Mind-Body Problem and Negative Theology
The White House has rehired a climate scientist who was forced out by the Trump administration, and is proposing to dramatically increase the budget of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. “Science is back” has become a Biden slogan. But listening to scientists is only the first step—and only a partial step, given the deep distrust many Americans have for experts. We must improve how ordinary citizens help shape science policy.
This is one of the findings of a recent report from the Hastings Center that examines the role of citizens in shaping policy in health and science. That role should not be limited to electing candidates and then, a few years later, expressing approval or disapproval of their job performance. Too many issues are in play at once for the voting–governing connection to be meaningful for many of them, and most people do not choose candidates on the basis of a clear understanding of policies, anyway
It is unlikely, for example, that elections will provide guidance about the governance of new technologies such as gene editing, assisted reproduction or artificial intelligence. That doesn’t mean that citizens’ views can’t help shape those policies through mechanisms such as public comment periods on proposed federal rules and public referenda at the state level. But those who influence rulemaking rarely represent the larger public, and neither comment periods nor referenda are deliberative processes in which people become informed about an issue and discuss it with people who might have different views.
What we need are opportunities for Americans to talk and listen to each other face to face, as equals, ideally in person but virtually if need be, about the values and the facts that should guide policy. Americans are not as divided as elected officials, and where they disagree, deliberation can reduce the distance between them. We also can learn to talk and listen with greater mutual respect. The nation was built on this principle of equality, and Americans of all political perspectives must live it.
There have been many small-scale efforts along these lines, mostly undertaken by academics or small nonprofits in what’s known as the civic renewal movement. Typically, these bring people from a community together to discuss local issues, which can help shift the focus from national politics and disagreements about issues that may be abstract and distant toward immediate, concrete problems and shared interests. For example, instead of discussing climate change in general, which is hard to disconnect from the national political divide, participants can focus on the effect of river flooding on farmers. This kind of local entry point can even lead to a deeper understanding of the broader national issue.
But deliberation is possible, and could be productive, at a national level as well. One example is America in One Room, in which 523 Americans spent a weekend together discussing a range of policy issues in order to become less polarized and more confident about U.S. democracy. Such an event is a logistical challenge, but similar events can be held online, which also reduces costs and allows more people to participate.
Public deliberation could also be tailored to the many issues that tend to elude the voting/governing feedback loop. Gene editing is a prime example. Reports from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine and other bodies around the world have argued that policy on genetic editing technologies should be guided by public deliberation.
Public deliberation could also shape the distribution of scarce resources in a disaster like the COVID-19 pandemic, or the use of public health measures such as vaccine certificates. And the groundswell of support among the public for more attention to climate change suggests that public deliberation could help galvanize the political will to overcome the policy-making logjam in the federal government.
In the end, good science depends on democracy, and democracy depends on a deeper, richer engagement between citizens and governance structures. In a healthy democracy, institutions both private and governmental help create citizens who learn, talk and listen better—who are better able to be engaged and effective—and in turn, active, engaged citizens strengthen the institutions of a good democracy. We don’t just need good government: we need a good society that builds good citizens, who in turn build a better society.
This is an opinion and analysis article; the views expressed by the author or authors are not necessarily those of Scientific American.
Horns, spikes and bony plates—dinosaurs developed many adaptations to protect themselves. But paleontologist Lawrence M. Witmer has discovered that a group of dinosaurs called ankylosaurs had a secret weapon. It was even more important than their tanklike armor, and it was hidden inside their skull: their nasal passages.
Ankylosaurs’ thick full-body armor protected them from predators, but it did not allow much heat to escape from their huge body. Paleontologists were puzzled at how these animals were able to regulate their temperature and survive under the blazing Cretaceous-period sun.
Using advanced scanning and 3-D modeling technologies in his Ohio University lab, Witmer and his colleagues discovered that Euoplocephalus, a genus of ankylosaurs, had strange corkscrew-shaped nasal passages that Witmer likens to a “child’s crazy straw.”
Jason Bourke, a former doctoral student of Witmer’s, now at the New York Institute of Technology College of Osteopathic Medicine at Arkansas State, modeled the dinosaur’s nasal airflow and found the corkscrew shape allowed the passages to act like the coils inside a modern air conditioner. They helped cool ankylosaurs’ blood before it reached the brain, preventing the animals from dying of heat stroke.
Witmer’s study is part of a larger research effort to understand how different groups of dinosaurs dealt with the extreme heat of their environment. In in ankylosaur fossils, the answer was relatively easy to find: their nasal passages were well-preserved inside their bony skull. But the answer is proving more elusive in dinosaurs whose skull had large openings, including long-necked sauropods and carnivorous dinosaurs such as Tyrannosaurus rex.
For Witmer, unearthing this knowledge is not strictly about understanding the giants of the past. “Right now we’re seeing this unprecedented global warming, global climate change, which is disrupting all kinds of weather patterns,” he says. “Dinosaurs, in a sense, can give us some insight into how animals today might be able to deal with this increased heat that we see.”
New research finds they fly around on noise-cancelling wings
By Karen Hopkin
Extreme magnification of moth wing scales.
Karen Hopkin: This is Scientific American’s 60-Second Science. I’m Karen Hopkin.
[CLIP: Audio of bat calls]
Hopkin: Bats use echolocation to hunt for their meals, and moths are often on the menu. But in the acoustic arms race between predator and prey, moths also have a trick or two up their sleeve—or, actually, on their wings, because a new study shows that moth wings are covered with scales that absorb sound, particularly the ultrasonic variety preferred by bats.
Thomas Neil: So moth and butterfly wings are covered in layers of scales. These are made of a naturally occurring polymer called chitin, which is a polymer you find in most insect and crustacean exoskeletons.
Hopkin: That’s Thomas Neil of the University of Bristol. He started out by bombarding bits of moth wings with sound and seeing what bounced back.
Neil: We discovered that moth scales actually resonate in response to being hit with ultrasound. And they resonate at frequencies that pretty much perfectly match the frequencies that bats use for echolocation.
Hopkin: That vibration converts sound energy to mechanical energy, which muffles the echo that gets back to the bats.
Neil: That probably hasn’t happened by accident, that these scales are such a shape and size that they’re resonating at just the right frequencies that they can absorb sound energy from hunting bats.
Hopkin: Next, Neil and his colleagues modeled the sound-dampening capabilities of an array of different scales.
Neil: The really cool thing about moths is their scales are all different shapes and sizes. So what we found is that each individual scale will resonate at slightly different frequencies—and that, collectively, they actually absorb a really broadband range of frequencies.
Neil: So it means that the moths should be pretty well protected from a whole host of bats that they might interact with out in the wild.
Hopkin: But does the strategy actually work?
Neil: So we don’t actually know how effective these scales are at protecting moths in the real world. But from everything we can model and measure and predict, it seems like they would have quite a considerable advantage in trying to hide these moths from bats hunting at night.
Hopkin: For any bats that might be listening, Neil says there’s not much you can do to thwart this moth maneuver.
Neil: The only real thing that they could do would be to call at higher amplitudes, so to increase the strength of their own echolocation calls such that the echo they got from a moth would be stronger.
Hopkin: In other words, you might catch more moths with a shout than with a whisper.
I am very sure that there is life up there, somewhere in our solar system,” says Christine Moissl-Eichinger, a microbiologist at the Medical University of Graz in Austria. But like any scientist, Moissl-Eichinger knows full well that substantial proof is needed for such a substantial claim. So she and others are working to find that proof—both here on Earth and on Mars.
On the Red Planet, NASA’s Mars rover Perseverance is searching for fossils and traces of alien biochemistry in Jezero Crater, an ancient lake bed thought to have once offered habitable conditions for microbial life. Back home, microbiologists are investigating oxygen-poor environments that may mimic the habitat of early Mars. This two-pronged approach of grounding scientists’ extraterrestrial extrapolations with studies of Earthly analogues could help clarify the bedrock limits for life on rocky planets, greatly aiding the development and execution of future extraterrestrial missions.
The Mars Analogues for Space Exploration project (MASE) was a four-year-long effort that used Earth to understand Mars by analyzing five types of harsh but habitable terrestrial environments that may resemble those that once—or even now—existed on our neighboring planet. Its funding concluded in 2017, but MASE researchers continue to publish results about the habitability of Mars. The study sites included a sulfidic spring, a briny mine, an acidic lake and river, and permafrost. Because of the extreme conditions in these environments, organisms that live here are called extremophiles.
Extremophile research was pioneered by the late Thomas Brock, a microbiologist at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. He found, against all expectations, that certain hardy microbes could thrive in geothermal springs hot enough to poach an egg. The microbiologist’s curiosity led to the isolation of a molecule—from a heat-loving bacterium—that is now used in laboratories across the world to amplify and sequence DNA. Brock passed away in April 2021, but his legacy lives on.
Brock published his extremophile findings in April 1969, mere months before humans first walked on the moon. This paved the way for astrobiology, the study of life in all its forms on this planet and elsewhere in the universe. Astrobiology is not about making money off of space travel, says Luke McKay, a researcher at Montana State University, who was not involved with that study or Moissl-Eichinger’s recent research. It is about basic science and answering a single, timeless question: Does life exist beyond Earth?
This is a question so profound that so far scientists have only managed to chip away at its edges, with each hard-won revelation usually accompanied by a host of newfound mysteries. Moissl-Eichinger and her team’s chief contribution has been their attempt at cultivating extremophiles from MASE’s five environments, but even this straightforward task has been devilishly difficult. Out of more than 1,000 different extremophile species gathered from those sites, the team managed to grow just 31 in the lab. This is a common struggle in environmental microbiology. Because these microbes live in extreme places, it is difficult for researchers to re-create the exact conditions they require to thrive. To capture more of the diversity, the team’s scientists used genetic sequencing, which allowed them to look at all the microbial DNA in their samples. They specifically searched for genes that may help microbes survive hostile conditions, such as extreme temperatures or the absence of oxygen.
“Cultured [microbial] isolates are not representative of the environment, and that’s why it’s really cool what they did. By using isolates and sequencing, I think they really tried to cover all the bases,” McKay says.
Despite their trouble culturing their extremophile samples, the researchers discovered a vast diversity of microorganisms in all five locations. Even in the most extreme Earthly environments, it seems, life indeed finds a way. Most remarkably, the team’s DNA sequencing revealed 34 unique microbial sequences that were conserved in all MASE sites, which is evidence of microbes surviving a combination of extreme environments. According to Moissl-Eichinger, although many microbes are adapted to live in certain conditions such as intense cold or scant oxygen, it is novel to find a group of microbes adapted to survive a combination of these extreme stressors. This ability to survive in many types of environments strengthens the researchers’ claims that similar microbes could exist on Mars—not only in the deep past but even today.
“Microbes are everywhere. They can live in places where we’d expect they could not thrive, but somehow they do,” Moissl-Eichinger says. “Of course, on Mars, we do not know if these [extremophiles] are the types of microorganisms we expect to see. They may just be very adapted to life on Earth.”
One way these microbes may be particularly adapted to our planet is their dependence on carbon-based compounds, or organic matter. These are the molecular building blocks of life on Earth and may be rare in some otherwise habitable extraterrestrial environments. Some microbes in environments with scarce organic matter can instead get nutrients from inorganic substances, such as ammonia and certain sulfur compounds. Yet all the microbes cultured in the MASE studies relied on organic carbon to survive—even those that could survive without oxygen. According to Moissl-Eichinger, this could be because microbes that consume organic matter grow faster. So with more time, she and her colleagues might successfully culture microbes that get their nutrients from other chemical sources, potentially revealing new biochemical pathways and ecological niches to consider when searching for life on Mars.
“We are far away from understanding what microbes could look like on Mars and how we can find them. But of course, research always gives a little piece by piece, and at some point, the picture gets fuller,” Moissl-Eichinger says.
Understanding how all these disparate pieces fit together may change our definition of what it means to be alive. According to McKay, extraterrestrial environments for life may be like those found on Earth, or they could differ vastly. At present, given our sample size of only one confirmed life-bearing world, both possibilities appear equally plausible.
“If [extraterrestrial life] is too [similar] to our life on Earth, people will argue that it is something that we brought with us. But if it is too different, will we be able to see it?” Moissl-Eichinger says. “Now that is the question that drives us.”
LAUNCH SITE ONE, West Texas—The richest person on Earth has now traveled beyond it.
Jeff Bezos, the billionaire founder of the spaceflight company Blue Origin, launched into suborbital space with three other people today (July 20) on the first crewed mission of the company’s New Shepard vehicle—a landmark moment for the man and the space tourism industry.
“Blue Control, Bezos. Best day ever!” Bezos said while in flight.
The autonomous New Shepard, which consists of a rocket topped by a capsule, lifted off from Blue Origin’s Launch Site One near the West Texas town of Van Horn today at 9:11 a.m. EDT (1311 GMT; 8:11 a.m.local time).
The capsule carried Bezos, 57, his brother Mark, 53, 82-year-old aviation pioneer Wally Funk and 18-year-old Dutch physics student Oliver Daemen 66.5 miles (107 kilometers) above Earth, then came down for a parachute-aided, dust-raising landing in the West Texas scrublands. The rocket also returned safely, making a vertical, powered touchdown at its designated landing zone. Its descent was punctuated by a deafening sonic boom, along with raucous cheers from the Blue Origin workers here who watched the flight.
All of this action, from liftoff to landings, took just over 10 minutes. But it was doubtless the experience of a lifetime for the four passengers.
“I’m so excited. I can’t wait to see what it’s going to be like,” Bezos told NBC’s TODAY on Monday (July 19). “People say they go into space and they come back changed. Astronauts always talk about that, whether it’s the thin limb of the Earth’s atmosphere and seeing how fragile the planet is, that it’s just one planet. So I can’t wait to see what it’s gonna do to me.”
Bezos became the second billionaire to reach space in less than two weeks. On July 11, Virgin Group founder Richard Branson flew on the first fully crewed flight of the VSS Unity space plane, which is operated by Virgin Galactic, Blue Origin’s chief rival in the suborbital space tourism business.
Two decades of work
Bezos founded Blue Origin in September 2000, six years after he established Amazon. The spaceflight company worked stealthily for a decade, generally staying out of the public eye.
That changed in 2010, when Blue Origin won a contract from NASA’s Commercial Crew Program, which aimed to encourage the development of private American astronaut taxis to fill the shoes of the space shuttle, which was about to retire. The company snagged another contract the next year but didn’t land the big deal; NASA announced in 2014 that it had selected the vehicles built by SpaceX and Boeing—capsules known as Crew Dragon and CST-100 Starliner, respectively.
Blue Origin continued to work on its own vehicles, including New Shepard, which is designed to carry people and payloads on brief trips to suborbital space. The 59-foot-tall (18 meters) craft is named after NASA astronaut Alan Shepard, whose suborbital jaunt on May 5, 1961, was the United States’ first crewed spaceflight.
New Shepard first launched to suborbital space in April 2015. The capsule landed softly as planned on that flight, but the rocket crashed during its touchdown attempt. But the next New Shepard iteration aced a test flight that November, pulling off the first-ever vertical landing of a rocket during a space mission. (SpaceX nailed a landing of its own a month later with the first stage of its Falcon 9 orbital rocket, a feat Elon Musk’s company has now pulled off more than 80 times.)
In January 2016, the same New Shepard flew successfully again, notching another reusability milestone. Over the next five-plus years, that vehicle and two others flew 12 more uncrewed test missions, the latest an “astronaut rehearsal” this past April.
All were successful, paving the way for today’s mission, which was the third flight of the fourth New Shepard vehicle, known as RSS Next Step.
Making, and acknowledging, history
Blue Origin announced the July 20 target on May 5. Both of those dates were chosen advisedly: May 5 was the 60th anniversary of Shepard’s pioneering flight, and July 20 is the 52nd anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing.
Bezos has often cited Apollo 11 as a big inspiration, saying that his dreams of spaceflight were born when he watched the historic lunar landing at the age of five.
Blue Origin made some history of its own today, and not just for the company annals: Funk and Daemen became the oldest and youngest people, respectively, ever to reach the final frontier.
The off-Earth journey was a dose of long-overdue justice for Funk. She’s one of the “Mercury 13,” women who passed NASA’s physiological screening tests in the early days of the space age but were never seriously considered for flight. Back then, you had to be a man—and more specifically, a white military man—to be a NASA astronaut.
The agency didn’t fly a female astronaut to space until June 1983, when Sally Ride reached orbit on the space shuttle Challenger’s STS-7 mission. (Challenger’s STS-8 flight, which launched that August, carried Guion Bluford, the first African American to reach space.)
Funk takes the oldest-spaceflyer mantle from John Glenn, who launched at the age of 77 in October 1998 on the STS-95 mission of the shuttle Discovery, decades after becoming the first American to reach orbit.
Blue Origin announced on July 1 that today’s flight would include Funk. Daemen was a later addition to the manifest; the company revealed his participation just last Thursday (July 16). In mid-June, Blue Origin auctioned off the fourth and final seat on RSS Next Step, for the astronomical sum of $28 million. But the still-anonymous person who placed that bid had scheduling conflicts, company representatives said, so Daemen took their place.
Daemen’s father, Somerset Capital Partners CEO Joes Daemen, paid for the seat and decided to let his son fly, CNBC reported. So, in addition to all the other milestones, RSS Next Step flew its first paying customer today.
Suborbital space tourism lifts off
Virgin Galactic made its big announcement about Branson’s flight on July 1, the same day that Blue Origin did its Funk reveal. The dramatic news drops sparked many stories about a “billionaire space race,” which both Branson and Bezos have attempted to tamp down.
”There’s one person who was the first person in space—his name was Yuri Gagarin—and that happened a long time ago,” Bezos said on TODAY, referring to the cosmonaut’s landmark orbital mission on April 12, 1961. (And Branson wasn’t the first billionaire to reach the final frontier. For example, megarich software architect Charles Simonyi bought two trips to the International Space Station, flying there in 2007 and 2009 aboard Russian Soyuz spacecraft.)
“I think I’m gonna be number 570 or something; that’s where we’re gonna be in this list,” Bezos added. “So this isn’t a competition. This is about building a road to space so that future generations can do incredible things in space.”
Blue Origin aims to help make those incredible things happen over the long haul. The company is building an orbital launch system called New Glenn and a lunar lander named Blue Moon. Blue Origin also leads “The National Team,” a private consortium that proposed a crewed landing system for use by NASA’s Artemis program of lunar exploration. NASA picked SpaceX’s Starship vehicle for that job, but The National Team and another unsuccessful submitter, Alabama-based company Dynetics, have filed protests about the decision with the U.S. Government Accountability Office.
Whether or not there’s personal competition between Branson and Bezos, the companies led by the two billionaires are vying for the same relatively small pool of rich, adventurous customers.
Virgin Galactic’s most recently stated ticket price was $250,000. Blue Origin has not announced how much it’s charging for a regular (non-auctioned) seat, but it’s thought to be in the low six figures as well.
Both companies offer passengers three to four minutes of weightlessness and great views of Earth against the blackness of space. But there are significant differences between the two flight experiences. For example, New Shepard is an autonomous capsule that launches vertically and lands under parachutes, whereas VSS Unity is a two-pilot space plane that takes off under the wing of a carrier aircraft and lands on a runway.
New Shepard also gets a few miles higher than VSS Unity, a fact that Blue Origin highlighted in a couple of Twitter posts on July 9. Those tweets told folks that spaceflights with Virgin Galactic come with an asterisk because Unity doesn’t reach the Kármán line, the 62-mile-high (100 km) mark considered by some to be the point where space begins. (Unity does fly higher than 50 miles, or 80 km, the boundary recognized by NASA, the U.S. military and the Federal Aviation Administration.)
This competition will heat up soon, if all goes according to plan. Blue Origin plans to launch two more crewed New Shepard missions this year, with the next one targeted for September or October, company representatives said during a prelaunch press conference on Sunday (July 18). Those flights will presumably have paying customers on board, just as today’s did.
Virgin Galactic aims to fly a few more test flights this fall, then begin full commercial operations early next year from Spaceport America in New Mexico. Both companies plan to ramp up their flight rate over time, allowing them to reduce prices and broaden the customer pool substantially—perhaps enough for the rest of us to swim in it someday.
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The Borg have landed—or, at least, researchers have discovered their counterparts here on Earth. Scientists analysing samples from muddy sites in the western United States have found novel DNA structures that seem to scavenge and ‘assimilate’ genes from microorganisms in their environment, much like the fictional Star Trek ‘Borg’ aliens who assimilate the knowledge and technology of other species.
These extra-long DNA strands, which the scientists named in honour of the aliens, join a diverse collection of genetic structures—circular plasmids, for example—known as extrachromosomal elements (ECEs). Most microbes have one or two chromosomes that encode their primary genetic blueprint. But they can host, and often share between them, many distinct ECEs. These carry non-essential but useful genes, such as those for antibiotic resistance.
Borgs are a previously unknown, unique and “absolutely fascinating” type of ECE, says Jill Banfield, a geomicrobiologist at the University of California, Berkeley. She and her colleagues describe their discovery of the structures in a preprint posted to the server bioRxiv. The work is yet to be peer-reviewed.
Unlike anything seen before
Borgs are DNA structures “not like any that’s been seen before”, says Brett Baker, a microbiologist at the University of Texas at Austin. Other scientists agree that the find is exciting, but have questioned whether Borgs really are unique, noting similarities between them and other large ECEs.
In recent years “people have become used to surprises in the field of ECEs”, says Huang Li, a microbiologist at the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing. “However, the discovery of Borgs, which undoubtedly enriches the concept of ECEs, has fascinated many in the field.”
Their vast size, ranging between more than 600,000 and about 1 million DNA base pairs in length, is one feature that distinguishes Borgs from many other ECEs. In fact, Borgs are so huge that they are up to one-third of the length of the main chromosome in their host microbes, Banfield says.
Banfield studies how microbes influence the carbon cycle—including the production and degradation of methane, a potent greenhouse gas—and, in October 2019, she and her colleagues went hunting for ECEs containing genes involved in the carbon cycle in Californian wetlands. There, they found the first Borgs and later identified 19 different types from this and similar sites in Colorado and California.
Borgs seem to be associated with archaea, which are single-celled microorganisms distinct from bacteria. Specifically, those Banfield and her team have discovered are linked to the Methanoperedens variety, which digest and destroy methane. And Borg genes seem to be involved in this process, says Banfield.
Scientists can’t yet culture Methanoperedens in the laboratory—an ongoing challenge for many microbes—so the team’s conclusions that Borgs might be used by the archaea for methane processing are based on sequence data alone.
“They’ve made an interesting observation,” says systems biologist Nitin Baliga, at the Institute for Systems Biology in Seattle, Washington. But he cautions that when researchers sift through fragments of many genomes and piece them together, as Banfield’s team has done, it’s possible to make errors. Finding Borgs in cultured Methanoperedens will be necessary for the finding to be considered definitive, he adds.
Costs and benefits
Assuming Borgs are real, maintaining such a massive ECE would be costly for Methanoperedens, Banfield and colleagues say, so the DNA structures must provide some benefit. To learn what that might be, the researchers analysed the sequences of hundreds of Borg genes and compared them with known genes.
Borgs seem to house many genes needed for entire metabolic processes, including digesting methane, says Banfield. She describes these collections as “a toolbox” that might super-charge the abilities of Methanoperedens.
So what makes a Borg a Borg? In addition to their remarkable size, Borgs share several structural features: they’re linear, not circular as many ECEs are; they have mirrored repetitive sequences at each end of the strand; and they have many other repetitive sequences both within and between the presumptive genes.
Individually, these features of Borgs can overlap with those seen in other large ECEs, such as elements in certain salt-loving archaea, so Baliga says the novelty of Borgs is still debatable at this stage. Borgs also resemble giant linear plasmids found in soil-dwelling Actinobacteria, says Julián Rafael Dib, a microbiologist at the Pilot Plant for Microbiological Industrial Processes in Tucumán, Argentina.
Banfield counters that although the individual features of Borgs have been seen before, “the size, combination and metabolic gene load” is what makes them different. She speculates that they were once entire microbes, and were assimilated by Methanoperedens in much the same way that eukaryotic cells gained energy-generating mitochondria by assimilating free-living bacteria.
Now that scientists know what to look for, they might find more Borgs by sifting through old data, says Baker, who used to work in Banfield’s lab. He thinks he might already have discovered some candidates in his own genetic database since the preprint was posted.
Resistance is futile
When analysing the Borg genome, Banfield and colleagues also saw features suggesting that Borgs have assimilated genes from diverse sources, including the main Methanoperedens chromosome, Banfield says. This potential to ‘assimilate’ genes led her son to propose the name ‘Borg’ over Thanksgiving dinner in 2020.
Banfield’s team is now investigating the function of Borgs and the role of their DNA repeats. Repeats are important to microbes: differently-structured repeats called CRISPR are snippets of genetic code from viruses that microbes incorporate into their own DNA to ‘remember’ the pathogens so they can defend against them in the future.
CRISPR and its associated proteins have been a boon for biotechnology because they have been adapted into a powerful gene-editing technique—hinting that Borg genomes might also yield useful tools. “It could be as important and interesting as CRISPR, but I think it’s going to be a new thing,” says Banfield, who is collaborating on future investigations with her preprint co-author, Jennifer Doudna, a pioneer of CRISPR-based gene editing at the University of California.
One potential application that the researchers see for Borgs could be as an aid in the fight against climate change. Fostering the growth of microbes containing them could, perhaps, cut down the methane emissions generated by soil-dwelling archaea, which add up to about 1 gigatonne globally each year. It would be risky to do this in natural wetlands, Banfield says, but it might be appropriate at agricultural sites. So, as a first step, her group is now hunting Borgs in Californian rice paddies.
This article is reproduced with permission and was first published on July 16 2021.
It was late afternoon in the winter scrub desert within Namibia’s Etosha National Park when I spotted a family of elephants on the southern edge of the clearing. I was scanning the horizon from the observation tower where my colleagues and I conduct our research at Mushara water hole. Wind had deterred elephant families from visiting the water hole earlier—it interferes with their efforts to keep tabs on one another vocally—but with the air now still, our first customers of the day had finally appeared.
Judging from how many trunks were stretched high, sampling the air, the group was itching to break cover and run for the water. The young males were particularly anxious to get going. Not only were they thirsty, but they had a lot of sparring to catch up on. As winter wears on, the environment dries out, and elephants have to venture farther from water to find enough to eat. Several days may pass before they can return to the water hole for a drink and a reunion.
I could see why this group was holding back, however. Another elephant family was amassing in the southeastern forest and heading our way, and the adult females were wary. They stood with their feet firmly planted, ears held straight out, as they sniffed what little remained of the prevailing wind for any potential danger. Not only would exiting the security of the forest expose the family to predators, but an encounter with a higher-ranking elephant family could result in an aggressive interaction. For the youngsters in the group, however, more families meant more opportunities to play. So after thoroughly assessing the clearing, the matriarch gave the word with a rumble and an ear flap, and the family began its approach to the water.
Late afternoon is my favorite time of day during our field season in the austral winter—the air cools fast as the sun sinks low in the sky, painting the elephants a radiant pink. My colleagues and I stand in the observation tower with a celebratory drink in hand, our binoculars trained on the horizon, hoping for a sunset visit like this one from one of our beloved resident families. During these daily visits, I always learn a new lesson about elephants—particularly when they play.
I have witnessed the important role of play in calf development and family politics by watching members of my favorite elephant groups frolic at this water hole at sunset. These often chaotic observations inspired me to want to understand more about how animals play and what advantages this behavior might confer, not just to elephants but to all social creatures, including humans. It turns out that play, like other forms of interaction, has rules of engagement. And it is essential for developing the physical and cognitive faculties that animals need to survive and reproduce.
Rules and Regulations
People tend to think of play as an activity one engages in at one’s leisure, outside of learning important skills needed to succeed later in life, such as hunting, mating, and evading predators. But although playing is fun for all involved—and fun for those who are watching—play behaviors evolved as ritualized forms of survival skills needed later in life, providing the opportunity to perfect those skills.
Engaging in play allows animals to experiment with new behaviors in a protected environment without dangerous consequences. The unwritten code of conduct surrounding play lets them explore many possible outcomes.
Animals learn the rules of engagement for play at a very young age. Among dogs, the bow is a universal invitation to engage in silliness that triggers the same bowing down and splaying of the front legs in the receiver of the signal—inevitably followed by chasing and pretend biting. Chimpanzees and gorillas motivate others to romp by showing their upper and lower teeth in what primatologists refer to as a play face, which is comparable to human laughter.
When a young male elephant wants to play with another male of similar age, he holds his trunk up and presents it to the other as an invitation. Most often his next move would be to place his trunk over the other’s head, which in adults signals dominance but in calves is guaranteed to precipitate a spirited sparring match. These encounters run the gamut from gentle shoving to intense headbutting and pushing back and forth with trunks entwining and tusks clacking. The fun continues for seconds to minutes for youngsters; for older teens and young adults, it can go on much longer. The sparring matches provide bulls with the opportunity to test their fighting ability so that they might successfully compete for a female when they reach sexual maturity and enter the hormonal state of musth around the age of 25.
When a young male elephant is feeling particularly adventurous, he may venture far away from Mom’s protection to invite a distant relative to spar. If his foray takes him too far away or if a spar turns unexpectedly rough, the brave calf will lose his nerve and often will run quickly back to Mom’s side with ears flapping and trunk yo-yoing as he retreats.
Occasionally an older sister will oversee a play bout between youngsters. These ever watchful siblings form part of an extended caretaking network that facilitates play, but its members also will intervene if a calf crosses an invisible bloodline and gets deflected with a trunk slap by an overly protective, high-ranking mother.
Forms of Play
Scholars of animal behavior recognize three main categories of play. The first is social play, which is any kind of antic that involves others. The second is locomotive play—including running, walking, jumping and pouncing—which facilitates lifelong motor skills. In prey species, locomotive play helps to perfect predator-avoidance tactics such as the springbok’s “pronking” high into the air while running as a herd and landing in unpredictable spots. In elephants, it hones predator-avoidance skills, as well as strategies for escaping an aggressive suitor or a competitor looking to inflict a mortal wound. Conversely, young predators such as lion cubs use locomotive play to sharpen their hunting ability. Chasing and tripping littermates and then giving them a good chew on the spine or throat are rehearsals of the skills needed to catch prey animals and dispatch them by severing their spinal cord or choking them.
Many species, including our own, engage in the mock-fighting variety of locomotive play, which allows them to test their strength in a safe environment where everyone understands the rules. A playful spar in elephants is just like an arm wrestle between human peers. When play becomes more elaborate and determined, it turns from an arm wrestle into something akin to martial arts, allowing both participants to practice skills and develop innovative solutions that could help them avoid mortal combat later in life. Play fighting also provides opportunities to test boundaries, gauge who can be trusted and learn important body language.
The third main category of play is object play, which incorporates objects from the environment into the cavorting. For an elephant, this object might take the form of a stick or branch that the elephant explores, carries or throws with its trunk. In captivity, elephants enjoy playing with balls or hauling inner tubes around for fun. Alternatively, the object could be another animal, such as a zebra or giraffe, that offers an irresistible opportunity for a chase. In one case, a four-year-old male calf named Leo taught his baby brother, Liam, just how fun such a chase can be, leaving Liam scrambling to keep up with Leo’s charge as a giraffe made a quick escape.
Two other forms of play have been documented only in great apes, including humans. One of these, game playing, combines social, locomotive and object play. Sports such as soccer, field hockey, lacrosse and polo are examples of traditional games that became formalized as sports with specific sets of rules (among nonhuman great apes, only captive individuals raised in human contexts play formal games). The other variety of play that appears to be unique to great apes is make-believe. For example, a wild chimpanzee may carry around a small log, pretending it is an infant. A human child might play with an invisible toy or set up an invisible barrier that they want adults to acknowledge.
Not Just Fun and Games
Play provides an environment for experimenting with risk. When a lion cub deliberately gives up some control over its body, it puts itself at a disadvantage, allowing others to succeed in pouncing on it. Marc Bekoff of the University of Colorado Boulder and his colleagues have proposed that play increases the versatility of movements used to recover from a loss of balance and enhances the ability of the player to cope with unexpected stressful situations. The goal is not to win but to improve skills, sometimes by self-handicapping.
Once a cub has been tackled by its littermates, roles might reverse such that a littermate handicaps itself, allowing the other cub to tackle it in return. Self-handicapping is risky and requires trust, but it is a great way to develop strength and agility. It is also an important exercise in building cooperation. In the Sawtooth wolf pack raised by Jim and Jamie Dutcher in the Sawtooth Mountains in Idaho, the dominant wolf would slow down to allow a close companion that happened to be a subordinate to catch up and tackle him. In elephants, on a number of occasions I have seen older male calves crouch down to allow a much younger calf to spar with them. This is akin to an older brother handicapping himself during an arm wrestle by not using all of his strength to let his little brother win.
Animals learn the rules of engagement for play early on. Among dogs, the “bow” is a universally understood invitation to play (top). Young predators such as lion cubs use play to develop their hunting skills (bottom). Credit: Nicola Gavin/Alamy Stock Photo (top); Manoj Shah/Getty Images (bottom)
Being silly is another important aspect of play, one that gets us outside our comfort zone and forces us to test new strategies. Silliness in our movements, behavior and even language helps us think much more broadly and creatively. Problem-solving derived from the silliness of play has been demonstrated in many species and even in robots. When mechanical engineer Hod Lipson of Columbia University gave his artificial-intelligence robots a chance to play—by dancing around in random movements—they outperformed other robots when challenged with the unexpected. The positioning information garnered from moving around randomly led one robot to come up with creative solutions for maintaining its balance after losing a limb.
Likewise, when sea lions play in the surf, they often project themselves high into the air midway down the face of monster waves, like those that roll into Santa Cruz. These are just the kinds of behaviors needed to avoid an attack by a great white shark—their primary predator apart from killer whales and humans.
Play also builds trust. Thomas Bugnyar of the University of Vienna in Austria and his colleagues found that ravens pretend to cache highly valued food items and then watch how other ravens respond, apparently to determine whom they can trust. Learning how to differentiate competitors from likely reliable collaborators early on has obvious advantages, whether one wants to gain allies or build a coalition within a group—or repair broken relationships.
Families Reunited
“Incoming from the southeast!” I called out from the Mushara tower as my elephant field team narrowed in on what looked like a dusty line of pinkish-gray boulders amassing on the edge of the clearing one afternoon during our 2018 field season. The search for identifying features began. A missing tusk, a notch in the bottom of the left ear, or a V-shaped cut in the top of the right ear would give the family away. Whoever identified the elephant family first would get an extra sundown drink.
That day the incoming family turned out to be the Actors. It was our first sighting of the group that season, and we were excited to see a new addition to the family: high-ranking Susan, identified by her daggerlike left tusk, had a new male calf, Liam. And low-ranking Wynona, who was missing her left tusk, had her two-year-old calf Lucy in tow. We had been following the contentious dynamic between these two mothers very closely over the years, particularly during the 2012 season when each had a calf—Leo and Liza, respectively.
Susan had relentlessly tormented Wynona all the way up to the end of her pregnancy, aggressively charging her whenever she got close to the water to drink. The tension was so high that when Wynona broke away from the family to give birth, surrounded by her daughter Erin and their calves, I worried for her baby’s life if a reunion were to take place. Sure enough, there was no fanfare and no reunion that we witnessed to present her new baby to the rest of the family. I assumed then that Wynona’s days as a member of the Actor family were numbered.
As predicted, Wynona did separate from the larger family and became the matriarch of her own core family. It went on like that for four years until the arrival of Wynona’s newest baby, Lucy, in 2016 yet again changed the dynamic of the larger extended family group. Play appeared to be an important contributing factor in reuniting the family.
Lucy’s older sister, Liza, had been a shy baby who stuck to her mom and her very close relatives. Wynona timed her movements to avoid too much overlap with the larger family group when they went to Mushara water hole to drink. They tended to be one day behind or ahead of the Actor family, usually behind. On the rare occasion that they did overlap just at the end of the extended family visit, Liza did not stray to interact with the larger family. And who would blame her? Susan was right there with a quick jab with her dagger tusk or a trunk slap, whichever was more convenient, making it clear that the low-ranking babies had no place on the playground with royalty. There was hardly a chance for calves of Wynona’s small but growing family to get to know members of the extended family.
Lucy changed all that. From the start, she was quite the extrovert. Maybe being born into a very small family made her all the more curious and excited by the opportunity to engage with the extended family on the infrequent occasion of their overlapping. And she was not deterred by the admonishments of high-ranking moms within the extended family, much to the seeming annoyance of the ever watchful Susan.
Now the two-year-old Lucy knew just how to run through adults’ legs and out of trunk’s reach, navigating potential minefields and dodging her mom’s attempts to rein her in. She behaved more like Susan’s calf, Leo, who was her older sister Liza’s contemporary. When we scored Leo’s distance from his mom at the water hole, he always had a much higher score than Liza. We had assumed that was attributable mainly to his sex and the male elephant’s early experiments with independence. But the arrival of Lucy showed us that the story was not that simple.
Lucy spent a lot of time a great distance away from her mom and played with calves of mothers of all ranks. When it came time to leave the water hole and go in separate directions, as dictated by the prevailing family politics, Lucy made that impossible. She was so busy playing with other calves that there was no extracting her, leaving Wynona no choice but to modify her behavior.
Instead of continuing on her premeditated departure route, in the opposite direction from the Actor family, Wynona, her eldest daughter Erin and their calves turned around and followed the rest of the family so that Wynona did not risk losing her new calf. There was no guarantee that the other mothers would protect Lucy, much less allow her to suckle, as that would mean fewer precious nutrients for their own calves. But by 2018 Wynona was fully reintegrated into the Actor family, whether she wanted to be or not.
Every time I see this dynamic unfold, it makes me smile. How often is it the case in our own families that grudges of older generations are put aside because of the bonds forged by the next generation through play?
Play should be on our daily agenda. Smiling and laughing are contagious behaviors that facilitate bonding, are curative and, most important, do not have to take up much time. The next time you feel like you are too busy to play a frivolous game at work or you don’t want to face that family reunion, make the time and muster the will. You might be surprised at the outcome, whether it be a better idea for a pitch meeting or the dissolution of a long-standing barrier between you and a contentious relative thanks to a good giggle.
Our highly adaptable and innovative nature is rooted in play. I am grateful to my favorite elephant, Wynona, and her daughter Lucy for reminding me that there is always something new we can learn from it—and that we are never too old to internalize those lessons. A good romp can pay off in ways I hadn’t anticipated. It forges new bonds, reunites divided families, improves coping skills and overall health, and facilitates cooperation and innovation. Given all these benefits, how could we afford not to play?
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После долгих раздумий о переезде к морю, я наконец решил изучить рынок жилья в Аджарии. Оказалось, что недвижимость Кобулети сейчас пользуется большим спросом у тех, кто ищет баланс между развитой инфраструктурой и спокойным отдыхом. Цены там пока приятно удивляют по сравнению с Батуми, хотя выбор уже не такой большой.
