Scientific American - June 2015
Scientific American - June 2015
Scientific American - June 2015
TECHNOLOGY
Our Best
Chance for Mars?
MEDICINE
Treatments for
Cells on Fire
ScientificAmerican.com
JUNE 2015
The
Amazing
Teen Bran
Rapidly changing
wiring leads to
mental agility
and risky
behavior
ON THE COVER
Teenage behavior is all over the map. For years neuro
scientists (and parents) have been baffled as to why. Exten
sive MRI studies are revealing that underneath the tri
umphs and pitfalls of teen life are sweeping changes in the
networking of brain regions. The new knowledge could
help teens avoid mental illness and make smart choices for
a bright future. Illustration by FOREAL.
56
FEATURE S
N EU ROSCI E N CE
ETHOLOGY
56 Birth of a Rocket
To some, nasas Space Launch System is a gigantic piece
AST RO N O MY
M E D I CI N E
44 Cells on Fire
Scientists have discovered how cells trigger inflam
mation, a critical factor in ailments as diverse as
atherosclerosis, Alzheimers and fatty liver disease.
New treatments may soon follow.
By Wajahat Z. Mehal
DEPARTMENT S
12 Forum
Its time to halt experiments that separate infant
monkeys from their mothers. By Barbara J. King
15 Advances
When dark matter collides. The wealth in sewage.
Dinosaurian fingers. An apocalypse think tank.
29 TechnoFiles
Feature-clogged tech upgrades keep selling
and we keep buying. By David Pogue
78 Recommended
21
80 Skeptic
The humanities and science share the virtues
of empiricism and skepticism. By Michael Shermer
81 Anti Gravity
Theres gold in them thar hills of solid waste.
By Steve Mirsky
Scientific American (ISSN 0036-8733), Volume 312, Number 6, June 2015, published monthly by Scientific American, a division of Nature America, Inc., 75 Varick Street, 9th Floor, New York, N.Y. 10013-1917. Periodicals postage paid at at
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Letters
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It would be wise
for us to give up
the notion that
we are a benevolent
and sharing species.
robert e. marx u
niversity of miami
miller school of medicine
February 2015
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At the lce, in contrast, the motherless infants undergo stressors (such as being intentionally frightened while they are alone)
in experiments designed to evaluate their reactivity and thus to
understand developmental risk factors leading to mental illness
in humans. Peer-reviewed literature from the lce reports that
these infants suffer behavioral and biological consequences for
the duration of their lives, including poor health, increased stress,
maternal incompetence and abnormal aggression.
As a person who watches two beloved family members struggle with mental illness, I know the importance of research in
this arena. Yet systematic reviews tell us conclusively that animal models do not translate well to human mental health. To
treat mental illness in humans requires direct attention to the
real stressors we experience in our own livesnot artificial ones
that we make rhesus infants endure. Research of diverse types,
including neuroimaging and long-term follow-up of patients
day-to-day lives, is making substantive inroads in this endeavor.
It is no adequate defense to note that this kind of research
meets federal and university animal care guidelines. The bar to
gain approval to experiment invasively on primates (and other
animals) is quite low. As Lawrence Arthur Hansen pointed out
two years ago in the J ournal of Medical Ethics, o
versight committees are disproportionately composed of the very people
who derive their livelihood from continuing these experiments:
animal researchers and institutional veterinarians.
Bringing onboard knowledgeable parties who do not directly
benefit from money awarded to these projectssocial scientists
and bioethicists, for instancewould be a first step in addressing this skew. As Hansen observes, though, equally necessary is
a change in institutional culture to ensure that committees
more directly consider benefit-harm issues.
I am struck by parallels with the case of biomedical research
on chimpanzees at the National Institutes of Health, which in 2011
was deemed unnecessary by an independent Institute of Medicine review. Repeatedly, biomedical studies on chimpanzees had
been approved by review boards and animal care committees. The
oversight process did not ethically protect those lab chimpanzees
in the past, and it is not ethically protecting the lab monkeys now.
It is not necessary to be against all biomedical research on
nonhuman primates to see how outdated and misguided some
research is. It is time to end Harlows cruel legacy.
SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN ONLINE
Comment on this article at ScientificAmerican.com/jun2015
ADVANCES
Dispatches from the frontiers of science, technology and medicine
Blue streaks
show bent light
that astronomers
use to weigh four
converging galaxies.
PH YSICS
Dark Matter
Drops a Clue
COURTESY OF ESO, NASA AND ESA/HUBBLE SPACE TELESCOPE
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The Hubble Space Telescope spied dark matter acting strangely in colliding galaxies.
of electromagnetismand the other absorbs it. This exchange transfers momentum, causing both protons to separate.
The news has galvanized physicists
in search of answers. If this holds up,
it is beyond a big deal, says physicist
Neal Weiner of New York University,
who was not involved in the study. A
scenario with dark photons is a change
from the most basic and popular conception of dark matter as a single type of
particle, commonly called a weakly interacting massive particle, or WIMP. But
the idea that dark matter involves dark
photons as well as exotic interactions
might help explain some problems with
the single-particle WIMP explanation
for dark matter, such as why the centers
of galaxies are less dense than expected.
This concept would also help physicists
considerably narrow down the list of dark
matter contenders. Although we have evidence of dark matter from a huge variety
of sources, Weiner says, we have so far
no clear indication of anything other than
its gravitational interaction. If it is shown
to have self-interactions at this level, it will
eliminate a huge number of models for
what dark matter could be. In particular,
the finding, released online in April and
published in June in M
onthly Notices of
COMMENT AT
ScientificAmerican.com/jun2015
ADVANCES
NEW VERSION
BY THE NUMBER S
Sewage Is a
Gold Mine
(Literally)
0.3
Grams of gold A
rizona State
University researchers extracted from
one metric ton of sewage
28,600
$13 million
ADVANCES
B I O M ECH A N I CS
Prehistoric Swagger
All dinosaurs o
nce pranced, strolled or lumbered about on two legs. But some took to
occasionally resting or running on all fours for
greater stability and over time evolved into
quadrupeds. During the transition, the forelimbs were shorter than the hind limbs, raising the question of how the intermediate animals leveled out the tilted stance from those
stubby appendages: Did they walk on their
fingertips or their palms? New research
suggests the lattersome early dinosaurs
and their close relatives may have stepped
straight down on the front of their palms.
Dinosaurs are closely related to alligators ancestors and consequently share
many structural features with gators. So
biologist Joel Hutson and geologist Kelda
Hutson compared the forelimb mechanics
of alligators with fossils from P
ostosuchusa
COMMENT AT
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ISTOCKPHOTO
I N T H E N EWS
Quick
Hits
NORTHERN IRELAND
Every secondary school will receive access to
an educational version of the popular video
game Minecraft to help teach science and
computer coding, among other subjects.
NORWAY/GREENLAND
Polar bears venture off the ice during summer months,
more than they have in past years, to eat seabird eggs
a change in behavior that is devastating bird populations,
according to a new study based on a decade of data.
U.S.
On June 5 and 6, finalists
in the darpa Robotics
Challenge put their
robots to the test in
disaster scenarios, vying
for a $2-million prize.
KIRIBATI
The International Group for Historic
Aircraft Recovery starts an expedition to
the island of Nikumaroro this month to
search for remnants of Amelia Earharts
plane; in 2014 the nonprofit found a
piece of aluminum there that bore the
planes signature pattern of rivets.
AUSTRALIA
One of the biggest
asteroid-impact zones
ever found was uncovered
deep in the earths crust,
measuring 400 kilo
meters wide. The space
rock split in two just
before striking the planet
some 300 million to
600 million years ago.
FRANCE
The International Earth Rotation and Reference Systems
Service, based at the Paris Observatory, adds an official
leap second to June 30 to compensate for the earths
rotation; four leap seconds have been added since 1999.
ADVANCES
MEDICINE
MosquitoDunks
MosquitoBits
VEINS
NAME: Eyes-On Glasses
MAKER: Evena Medical
PURPOSE: These specs help nurses locate veins
when inserting needles, IVs and catheters, saving
time and minimizing pain, injury and costs.
HOW IT WORKS: Eyes-On Glasses are like an x-ray
for blood vessels. They emit four benign beams
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CANCER
NAME: Fluorescent goggles
MAKER: Samuel Achilefu and his colleagues, Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis
PURPOSE: In many cases, it is extremely difficult for
a surgeon to be sure that the entirety of a tumor has
been excised because microscopic bits and pieces can
stay behind undetected. These goggles help doctors
notice lingering cancer cells, which could increase the
likelihood of a recurrence if not removed.
HOW IT WORKS: While operating, surgeons inject
tissue with a fluorescent dye that binds only to cancer cells and glows green under near-infrared light.
A camera fixed to a visor picks up the fluorescence
while a small computer and fiber-optic cable use
that information to overlay glowing dots on the
wearers field of view that indicate where a tumor
still remains.
PRICE: Less than $10,000
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PURPOSE: The glasses reveal bruises, rashes
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Idaho-based nurse Jake Youren used them to detect
hidden bruising on a woman who had recently been
in a car crash. Other doctors find the glasses useful
for spotting blood clots.
HOW IT WORKS: The human eye naturally tunes
to very subtle shifts in skin coloration that correspond to changes in blood flow. 2AIs spectacles,
which come in shades of green, pink and violet,
unlock the full potential of this innate sensitivity.
Dyes in the polycarbonate glasses block particular
wavelengths of light that ordinarily interfere with
our perception of either red oxygenated blood
the kind that accumulates with injuryor blue
unoxygenated blood running through veins.
PRICE: Starting at $127
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HEALT H
Our Personal
Vaccine
Helpers
A fact of early childhood
the world over, vaccines are
a mainstay of global public
health. But not all prove equally
effective in all kids. Why? Gut
microbes may be a big reason
Rotavirus used to infect m
ost young
sters until a widely available oral vaccine
came out in 2006. The virus, which
causes severe diarrhea and thus lifethreatening dehydration, still kills more
than 450,000 kids globally every year,
largely in Asia and Africa, because the
vaccine is not always effective. Vanessa
Harris of the University of Amsterdam
wanted to find out why infants in those
regions have such high rates of so-called
nonresponders. Perhaps, she reasoned,
the microbes that live in a childs large
intestine played a role.
Harris and her colleagues, including
collaborators in South Asia, studied
66 Pakistani infants and 66 matched
Dutch control subjects, all of whom
received the oral rotavirus vaccine.
Most of the children in the Netherlands
mounted the expected immune re
sponse, but only 10 of those in Pakistan
did the same. A genetic scan of fecal
samples taken from each infant before
the vaccine revealed that the responders
harbored a higher diversity of microbes
in their intestinal tract. They also car-
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Rain-Forest
Threats
Resume
Until recently, B
razil stood out as a
hopeful outlier in the plague of defor
estation. Between 1990 and 2010 clear
ing of tropical forests increased 62 per
cent worldwide, but in Brazil, such
destruction plummeted from 2004 to
2011, in part because of tough environ
mental regulations and a ban on the sale
of soybeans grown on rain-forest-cleared
land. Since August 2014, however, tree
cutting more than doubled in the coun
try compared with the same period a
year earlier, according to a satellite anal
ysis released this spring by the indepen
dent research institution Imazon.
The report may signal a new round
of challenges facing the worlds largest
rain forest. Most of the land cleared in
the uptick will serve as cattle pasture,
spurred by higher global prices for beef.
(Cutting the forest for ranches is the larg
est driver of deforestation in the Brazilian
Amazon, accounting for nearly 70percent
of clearing.) And Brazils recently reelect
ed president, Dilma Rousseff, has called
for several new hydroelectric dams and
a major highway that, if built, will slice
through the pristine heart of the Amazon.
COMMENT AT
ScientificAmerican.com/jun2015
ANTONIO SCORZA Getty Images (t op); RICARDO FUNARI Getty Images (m
iddle); RAPHAEL ALVES Getty Images (b ottom)
E N V I RO N M E N T
ADVANCES
PSYC H O LO GY
Kiddo
Knows Best
Unrealistically positive
views of children may
promote narcissism
Sometimes its cute w
hen kids act selfcentered. Yet parenting styles can make the
difference between a confident child and a
narcissistic nightmare, psychologists at the
University of Amsterdam and Utrecht University in the Netherlands concluded from
the first longitudinal study on the origins of
intense feelings of superiority in children.
Two prominent but nearly opposing
schools of thought address how narcissism
develops. The first attributes extreme selflove to a lack of affection from parents; the
other implicates moms and dads who place
their children on a pedestal by lavishing them
with praise. Over the course of 18 months,
565 kids aged seven through 11 took multiple
IN REASON WE TRUST
because I
Its
take God so
seriously that
I cant bring
myself to believe
in him. In that
way, its really a
sign of respect.
JULIA SWEENEY
Actress/author/comedienne
Monologist of Letting Go of God
Honorary FFRF Board Member
1-800-335-4021
FFRF is a 501(c)(3) educational charity
Rogue_Wallet_Best_Wallet.indd 1
4/23/15 11:22 AM
ADVANCES
Q&A
formulated guidelines
for recombinant DNA at
the Asilomar conference. Such issues arise
even more starkly today.
There is current debate
and anxiety about the
ethics and prudence of
new techniques: gain
of function experiments on viruses and
the use of so-called
CRISPR gene-editing
technology. As compared with the 1970s,
the community is now
more global, more competitive and more subject to commercial pressures. Id fear that whatever
can be done will be done somewhere
by someone. Even if there are formally
agreed protocols and regulations,
theyll be as hard to enforce as the
drug laws. Bioerror and bioterror rank
highest on my personal risk register
for the medium term (10 to 20 years).
Is there anything people worry
about that they shouldnt?
Many who live in the developed world
fret too much about minor risks (carcinogens in food, low-radiation doses,
plane crashes, and so forth). Some
worry too much about asteroid impacts, which are among the natural
risks that are best understood and easiest to quantify. Moreover, it will soon
be possible to reduce that risk by deflecting the path of asteroids heading
for the earth. Thats why I support the
B612 Sentinel project.
What should worry us more are
threats that are newly emergent. They
surely merit more attention, and they
are what CSER aims to study. Its an
important maxim that the unfamiliar
is not the same as the improbable. The
stakes are so high that even if we can
reduce the probability of catastrophe
by one part in a million, well have
earned our keep.
COMMENT AT
ScientificAmerican.com/jun2015
An Apocalypse
Think Tank
The Not So
Silent Epidemic
Snoring can signal life-threatening
apnea. New remedies such as
a jolt to a nerve may help
Every night, b
efore he goes to sleep, Al Pierce, whose thunderous snoring used to drive his wife out of their bedroom, uses a
small remote control to turn on an electronic sensor implanted
in his chest. The sensor detects small changes in his breathing
patternearly signs that Pierces airway is beginning to collapse
on itself. When the device senses these changes, it triggers a
mild jolt of electricity that travels through a wire going up his
neck. The wire ends at a tiny electrode wrapped around a nerve
that controls muscles in his tongue. The nerve, stimulated by
the charge, activates muscles that thrust Pierces tongue forward in his mouth, which pulls his airway open.
Throughout the night the 65-year-old plumber in Florence,
S.C., gets hundreds of little jolts, yet he sleeps quietly. In the
morning, rested and refreshed, Pierce uses the remote to turn
off the device.
This new technology, called upper-airway electronic stimulation and approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration
NEUROSCIENCE
amazing
IN BRIEF
fies at puberty, but the prefrontal cortex, which controls impulses, does not mature until the 20s. This
mismatch makes teens prone to risk taking but also
allows them to adapt readily to their environment.
Earlier onset of puberty in children worldwide is ex-
Theteen brain
is often ridiculed as an
oxymoronan example
of biology gone wrong.
sexually transmitted diseases, motor vehicle accidents, unwanted pregnancy, homicide, depression and suicide.
GREATER CONNECTIVITY
role for myelin. Neurons integrate information from other neurons but only fire to pass it on if the incoming input exceeds a
certain electrical threshold. If the neuron fires, that action initiates a series of molecular changes that strengthens the synapses,
or connections, between that neuron and the input neurons.
This strengthening of connections forms the basis for learning. What researchers themselves are now learning is that for
input from nearby and distant neurons to arrive simultaneously at a given neuron, the transmission must be exquisitely
timed, and myelin is intimately involved in the fine-tuning of
this timing. As children become teenagers, the rapid expansion
of myelin increasingly joins and coordinates activities in different parts of the brain on a variety of cognitive tasks.
Scientists can now measure this changing interconnectivity
by applying graph theory, a type of mathematics that quantifies
the relation between nodes and edges in a network. Nodes
can be any object or detectable entity, such as a neuron or a brain
structure like the hippocampus or a larger region such as the
prefrontal cortex. Edges can be any connections among nodes,
from a physical connection such as a synapse between neurons
to a statistical correlation such as when two parts of the brain
are activated similarly during a cognitive task.
Graph theory has helped me and others to measure how different brain regions develop and become interconnected to one
another and to correlate such features with changes in behavior
and cognition. Brain changes are not confined to adolescence.
Most brain circuits develop in the womb, and many continue to
change throughout life, well beyond the teen years. It turns out,
however, that during that period there is a dramatic increase in
connectivity among brain regions involved in judgment, getting
along with others and long-range planningabilities that profoundly influence the remainder of a persons life.
TIME TO SPECIALIZE
A NEW VIEW
or neuron groups become stronger (black lines that get thicker). The
analysis also shows that certain regions and groups become more
widely connected (green circles that get larger). These changes ultimately help the brain to specialize in everything from complex
thinking to being socially adept.
Age 12
More connections
Stronger connection
Age 30
R O O T S O F R I S K TA K I N G
Limbic region
Prefrontal cortex
Degree of Maturation
Limbic region
Development mismatch
A MISMATCH IN MATURATION
10
15
20
25
30
and gray matter can be influenced somewhat by the environment but that the fundamental timing is under biological control. Sociologists see this, too; risk taking, sensation seeking
and a move toward peers happen in all cultures, although the
degree can vary.
VULNERABILITY AND OPPORTUNITY
The Primal Teen: What the New Discoveries about the Teenage Brain Tell Us
about Our Kids. B arbara Strauch. Doubleday, 2003.
Development of Brain Structural Connectivity between Ages 12 and 30:
A 4-Tesla Diffusion Imaging Study in 439 Adolescents and Adults. Emily L.
Dennis et al. in NeuroImage, Vol. 64, pages 671684; January 1, 2013.
Age of Opportunity: Lessons from the New Science of Adolescence. L aurence
Steinberg. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2014.
FROM OUR ARCHIVES
The Myth of the Teen Brain. R obert Epstein; S cientific American Mind, A
pril/May 2007.
s c i e n t i f i c a m e r i c a n . c o m /m a g a z i n e /s a
SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN ONLINE For a review of the effectiveness of punishments for juvenile offenders, see ScientificAmerican.com/jun2015/giedd
Lght
A ST R O N O M Y
All the
CALEB CHARLAND
IN BRIEF
Why is
the night
sky dark?
After all, if the universe is filled with billions
of galaxies, every one of them swirling with
billions of stars that have been emitting
photons of light for billions of years, why
would the universe not be awash with
light? German astronomer Wilhelm Olbers
pondered that question in the 1820s, and the
riddle became known as Olberss paradox.
By then, astronomers and philosophers had
wondered for centuries why the sky was dark
and what the darkness implied about the
nature of the universe. It turns out that these
scholars were on to something truly profound.
More light is out there than we can easily see. Even from deep
space, far away from the lights of Earth and the stars of the Milky
Way, the sky of intergalactic space is not absolutely black. It
glows with what is called the extragalactic background light
(EBL). The EBL consists of all the photons of light radiated by all
the stars and galaxies that have ever existed, at all wavelengths
from the ultraviolet through the far infrared, during all of cosmic
history to the present. The EBL from distant galaxies is faint because extragalactic space is vast compared with the number of
galaxies that glow (or have ever done so). Because the universe is
expanding, the photons emitted by galaxies over the history of
the cosmos have spread throughout the cavernous volume of
space and become dilute. And because of the expansion, light
from distant galaxies undergoes a redshiftwavelength increases, pushing the light toward the red side of the electromagnetic spectrum, outside the visible realm.
Astronomers have realized for a while that this extragalactic
background light should exist but were unable to measure it accurately. Between 2012 and 2013, for the first time, researchers (including two of us, Domnguez and Primack) were able to unambiguously quantify the extragalactic background light using gamma-ray data from the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope and
ground-based very high energy gamma-ray detectors called atmospheric Cherenkov telescopes. Intriguingly, because stars contribute most of the EBL either directly as starlight or through heating
dust that radiates at longer wavelengths, the background preserves the memory of star formation at different epochs throughout the history of the universe. Indeed, measurements of the EBL
are allowing us to explore the evolution of galaxies from ancient
times to the present. Eventually it may let us study the very first
generation of galaxies from more than 13 billion years ago, whose
light is too faint to see directly with current telescopes.
T HE COSMIC BACKGROUNDS
Olberss paradox w
as primarily a philosophical question until the
1960s, when phenomenal astronomical discoveries across the entire electromagnetic spectrum were transforming cosmology
from speculation to a hard observational science. Researchers
were beginning to discover a menagerie of bizarre galactic and
extragalactic objects. The universe, it was becoming clear, is
filled with a rarefied gas of photons zooming every which way
through extragalactic space. These photons come in many wavelengthsand equivalently, in many energy ranges (shorter
wavelengths correspond to waves with higher frequencies and
thus greater energies; long wavelengths have lower frequencies
and thus smaller energies). That gas includes the EBL, as well as
several other radiation fields seen in all directions. The brightest is the cosmic microwave background (CMB), which originated from the explosive big bang. In 1965 Arno Penzias and Robert
W. Wilson discovered the CMB while at AT&T Bell Laboratories,
for which they received the 1978 Nobel Prize in Physics. Another
radiation field, an extragalactic diffuse x-ray background, was
discovered in the 1960s with sounding rockets. In the late 1960s
an orbiting solar observatory found yet another background of
more energetic gamma rays.
The EBLthe cosmic background encompassing the nearultraviolet, visible and infrared wavelengthsis second in energy and intensity to the CMB. Unlike the CMB, however, the EBL
was not produced all at once. Instead it has been growing over
billions of years, beginning with the formation of the first stars
in the first galaxies roughly 200 million years after the big bang.
Indeed, the EBL is still being added to today as new stars are
born and begin to shine.
Directly measuring the EBL by collecting its photons with a
telescope is akin to trying to observe the dim band of the Milky
Way at night from among the brightly lit theaters and skyscrapers
in New York Citys Times Square. The EBL has a lot of competition
at the same visible and infrared wavelengths. Earth is inside an
extremely bright galaxy with billions of stars and immense clouds
of glowing gas that outshine the extragalactic background light.
Even worse for directly measuring the EBL, Earth resides in a
very well-lit solar system: sunlight scattered by all the dust near
Earths orbit around the sun creates the zodiacal lightsometimes so luminous that from a dark site at the right time of year it
R A D I AT I O N F I E L D S
can be mistaken for early dawnthat
shines in similar wavelengths to the EBL.
How could astronomers ever hope to
isolate, capture and identify faint EBL
photons when they are swamped by a
The extragalactic background light ( EBL) includes all the light from all the galaxies
much brighter glow from the solar system
that have ever shined. It began to accumulate when the first stars and galaxies
and Milky Way? They cannot. Groundformed, roughly 200 million years after the big bang, and new galaxies add their
and space-based telescopes have not suclight all the time. Still, because space is so vast (and expanding), this light is dim
ceeded in reliably measuring the EBL di
and diffuse. The cosmic microwave background (CMB) is another radiation field
rectly. In 2000 Piero Madau of the Univerthat also pervades the universe. The CMB, however, does not grow with time;
sity of California, Santa Cruz, and Lucia
rather it was formed all at once, about 400,000 years after the big bang.
Pozzetti of the Bologna Astronomical ObCosmic microwave background
servatory added up the light from galaxies
detected by the Hubble Space Telescope.
Extragalactic background light
(Remember, the EBL is a
ll the light emitted from near-ultraviolet through infrared wavelengths, including all the light
from bright galaxies, which is easy to
measure, plus galaxies too faint for telescopes to see.) But that count did not include faint galaxies or other possible
Big
bang
sources of light, which means it gave only
a lower limit for how bright the EBL could
be at various wavelengths.
In 2011 Domnguez and Primack and
our observational collaborators placed
Inflation
stronger lower limits on the EBL by adding
up the amount of infrared and visible light
Star formation begins
observed from ground- and space-based
telescopes from nearby galaxies out to
about eight billion years agowhat astronomers call a redshift of 1, a little more than
halfway back in time to the big bang.
(Looking great distances out into space is equivalent to looking from Earth? If scientists could detect this attenuation of gamma
eons back in time because one sees objects as they looked when rays, they reasoned, it might reveal the composition of the EBL.
the light now reaching telescopes first departed on its journey
That question remained purely a matter of theoretical specubillions of years ago, in the case of truly distant galaxies.) We mea- lation until 1992, when nasas EGRET (Energetic Gamma Ray
sured the changing patterns of wavelengths emitted by galaxies at Experiment Telescope) detector onboard the orbiting Compton
different distancesthat is, at various cosmic eras. This method Gamma Ray Observatory discovered the first of a new class of
allowed the best EBL determination yet based on observations. gamma-ray sources that came to be called blazars: galaxies with
We calculated upper and lower estimates for the EBL from even central supermassive black holes emitting gamma rays in strong
more distant, older galaxies at redshifts greater than 1.
jets that happen to be pointed toward Earth like flashlight beams.
To move beyond limits, howeverto truly measure the bright- The gamma rays in such jets have phenomenal energies of bilness of the extragalactic background lightastronomers would lions of electron voltsthat is, giga-electron volts (abbreviated
need to take another tack.
GeV). Indeed, some blazars, such as Markarian 421 (Mrk 421 for
short), are emitting gamma rays at mind-boggling energies as
C OLLIDING LIGHT
high as 20 trillion electron volts (TeV), or about 100 million times
As far back as the 1960s, researchers started thinking about look- as much energy as medical x-rays.
ing for the EBL through its interactions with other, more easily
At about 400 million light-years away, the blazar Mrk 421 is
visible, forms of light.
relatively nearby as extragalactic distances go. But finding such a
Photons, it turns out, can collide with other photons. Specifi- powerful gamma-ray source in the 1990s made Primack wonder
cally, high-energy gamma rays may collide with lower-energy whether similar TeV-energy blazars might exist at far greater disphotons, such as visible starlight, and mutually annihilate to cre- tancesand thus be useful for detecting the EBL. Indeed, over
ate an electron and its antiparticle, the positron. Several astrono- the following years other TeV-energy gamma-ray blazars were
mers began to wonder: What might happen if high-energy gam- discovered at increasingly greater distances. And figuring out
ma rays from a distant cosmological source heading toward how to harness blazars to measure the EBL began to occupy
Earth collided with lower-energy EBL photons along the way? Domnguez in 2006, when he started Ph.D. research at the UniWould the EBL photons effectively waylay gamma rays, weaken- versity of Seville in Spain, where he studied blazars with the
ing the apparent brightness of the gamma-ray source as seen MAGIC gamma-ray observatory.
O B S E R VAT I O N T E C H N I Q U E
duced b
efore some of those gamma rays
were absorbed by collisions with EBL photons across billions of light-years of extragalactic space.
The best way of estimating a blazars
The extragalactic background light is difficult to detect
Blazar
initial output is to combine theoretical
directly because it is fainter than local foregrounds in
models of how blazars workespecially
the solar system and Milky Way. But when gamma rays
how they generate higher-energy gamma
(dashed lines) from distant objects, such as blazars
rayswith telescope observations of blagalaxies with supermassive black holes that emit those
zars lower-energy gamma rays and x-rays,
rayscollide with EBL photons, they can annihilate
which are not absorbed by the EBL as
one another to produce an electron (e-) and its antioften. The high-energy gamma rays in
particle, the positron (e+). Researchers used this fact
many blazars are thought to originate in a
to detect the EBL by measuring how much it dims
process called synchrotron self-Compton
Gamma rays
the blazars gamma rays. These rays cannot be
(SSC) scattering. In the blazar jet, an enerseen from the ground, but they emit a so-called
getic beam of electrons and positrons
Cherenkov cone of observable light when
interacting with magnetic fields emits
they travel through Earths atmosphere.
x-rays. Some of those x-rays are then hit
Between 2012 and 2013 scientists
Compton-scattered is the technical term
marshaled observations from the
Extragalactic
by the same energetic electrons, kicking
Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope,
background
them to much higher energies to become
other nasa spacecraft and several
light photon
gamma rays. The SSC models allow us to
ground-based telescopes of
Electron
predict the unattenuated intensity of the
blazars at different distances
high-energy gamma rays by comparing
to measure the EBL.
them with the low-energy gamma-rays we
can observe.
Fermi telescope
Finally, in 2013, Domnguez, Primack,
Positron
Justin Finke of the Naval Research Lab
Atmosphere
oratory, Francisco Prada of the Institute
of Astrophysics of Andalusia, and three
others collated nearly simultaneous obCherenkov light cone
servations of 15 blazars at different cosmological distances made by half a dozen
nasa spacecraft and several ground-based
telescopes operating at different wavelengths. We compared the Fermi Gammaray Space Telescope findings with the intensity of x-rays from the same blazars
measured by the x-ray satellites Chandra
X-ray Observatory, Swift, the Rossi X-ray
Timing Explorer and XMM-Newton, plus
optical and radio wavelengths measured
Ground telescope array
by ground-based observatories.
By comparing these observations in
various wavelengths with SSC models of
the blazars output, we were able to calIn 2012 Domnguez was among nearly 150 co-authors led by culate the original unattenuated g
amma-ray brightness emitMarco Ajello, now at Clemson University, who made the first ted at the highest TeV energies by nine of the blazars. We then
measurement of how much blazar light gets absorbed by the compared those calculations with direct measurements by
EBL. The team pored over data from nasas orbiting Fermi Gam- ground-based telescopes of the actual attenuated gamma-ray
ma-ray Space Telescope, analyzing observations of 150 blazars at light received at Earth from those same blazars. Thus, at long
different distances to measure how much their gamma rays were last, we measured the EBL through its imprint on the gamma
attenuated with increasing distancethat is, after traveling rays of various energies received from blazars located at differthrough greater thicknesses of the EBL. The observations ex- ent redshifts.
tended out to a redshift of 1.6, corresponding to light emitted almost 10 billion years ago.
W INDOW TO THE PAST
To improve on that measurement, astronomers needed a way The detection of the EBL was one of the toughest measurement
to better understand blazars intrinsic nature and thus to know challenges in observational astronomyperceiving such a faint
how many gamma rays of various energies a blazar actually pro- and diffuse signal required coordinating telescopes and re
SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN ONLINE Watch an animation of a blazar at ScientificAmerican.com/jun2015/ebl
M O R E TO E X P L O R E
FIRE
MEDICINE
CELLS ON
IN BRIEF
Redness, swelling, w
armth and pain
have long been recognized as hallmarks
of inflammation, which can be caused
by infection or tissue damage.
In the past several years s cientists determined that cells produce certain molecular complexes, known as inflammasomes, to launch the process.
Surprisingly, m
any seemingly unre
lated conditionssuch as Alzheimers,
gout and heart diseaseshare the same
inflammasomes.
nyone who has ever had a pimple is familiar with the tissue redness,
swelling, warmth and pain that mark an infection. This response,
known as inflammation, has been recognized since ancient times.
But the process, which is often set in motion by cells of the immune
system, can also occur whenever tissue is damagedeven in the ab
sence of a pathogenic organismas, for example, when you stub your
toe or, more seriously, suffer a heart attack. This second condition is
called sterile inflammation, and when it goes awry, it contributes to a wide range of seemingly
unrelated medical conditions, from Alzheimers disease to diabetes to various liver conditions.
Although prolonged inflammation and its role in disease have
been known for decades, research over the past few years has
yielded surprising and important insights into its origins. Among
the most intriguing: inflammation is not an automatic reaction
but requires the active assembly of molecular structures before it
can be launched. Cells involved in inflammation build the struc
turescalled inflammasomesquickly and then quickly disas
semble them, usually within a day of the injury. (Imagine assem
bling a factory in a few minutes when a product is needed and
then breaking it down once the need has passed, and you get the
picture.) Presumably the rapid disassembly helps the body to
avoid excessive damage. Some inflammation is helpful; it kills
pathogens and blocks their spread in the body. But too much can
harm nearby healthy tissues and thus extend any initial injury.
Discovery of the inflammasome is interesting to biologists in
its own right, but it also has profound implications for medicine.
Researchers have learned that disturbances in the assembly and
disassembly cycle can fuel ongoing, destructive inflammation.
Right now many medicines that fight pain and swelling block the
activity of certain proteins that fan the inflammatory flame. But
the new work suggests that medicines able to block creation of the
inflammasome or prompt its breakdown might impede the down
stream production of those problematic proteins and thereby re
duce tissue injury in a wholly new way. Such drugs, alone or in
combination with existing ones, should help fight inflammation
that currently does not respond well to therapy.
Indeed, recent discoveries about how inflammasomes some
times go into overdrive are forcing me and other medical investi
gators to radically change the way we think about human dis
ease. Rather than classifying diseases on the basis of the specific
organs (heart or liver) involved, we are thinking more in terms of
the cellular machinery that may be at fault: so far scientists have
characterized four different versions of inflammasomes, with
more likely to come. One advantage of this change in approach is
that researchers can start testing whether drugs that work for,
say, goutin which one particular inflammasome is activated
may also benefit individuals with heart disease, which is trig
gered by the same inflammasome.
STRANGER VS. DANGER
I N F L A M M AT I O N
DANGER SIGNALS
STRANGER SIGNALS
Microbes
Parasite
Fungus
Tissue injury
Virus Bacteria
Proteins
Crystal deposition
Beta-amyloid
Cholesterol
Asbestos
Overnutrition
Uric acid
Membrane
receptor
2 The first signal pathway
revs up the nucleus to create
the precursors necessary
to initiate inflammation.
Signal 2
Unknown
receptor
Signal 1
Inflammasome
Inflammasome precursors
Nucleus
Cytokine
precursors
Alzheimers
Cytokines
Mesothelioma
Atherosclerosis
Gout
The true stunner of the field, in my opinion, however, was the
discovery that eating can trigger an inflammatory response. More
specifically, eating too much in one sitting will trigger an acute
episode of inflammation that eventually resolves itself, and rou
tinely eating so many calories that the body has to store them
as fat triggers chronic inflammation. Biologists had little reason
to suspect such a relation. After all, nutrients are not bacteriaspecific molecules or particulates, nor are they sequestered in
side cells (which would make them obvious candidates for dan
A Malignant Flame. G
ary Stix; July 2007.
s c i e n t i f i c a m e r i c a n . c o m /m a g a z i n e /s a
the
networked
anmal
E T H O LO GY
In a wide variety
of species, who befriends
whom strongly influences
how individuals and the
larger group behave
By Lee Alan Dugatkin and
Matthew Hasenjager
IN BRIEF
Like we humans, m
embers of many animal species spend
their lives in complex social networks that influence their
and the groups behavior.
Researchers are using t echniques developed for the study
of human social networks to analyze these animal systems.
The structures of animal networks c an play a large part
in mating opportunities, the spread of disease and infor
mation, and the teaching of survival skills.
Analyses of these networks show that certain individuals
play outsize roles in maintaining the overall well-being
of the community.
It took both time a nd new ways of thinking for students of animal behaviorethologiststo realize just how important social
networks can be in the animal kingdom.
In the 1930s future Nobel laureate Konrad Lorenz published
his now famous studies describing imprinting in geesethe
instinctive emotional attachment of a newborn to the first caretakers it encounters during a critical period in development.
Soon the idea that most creatures are basically robots, engaging
in hardwired, programmed behavior (that is, under the control
of genes) became dogma.
Quickly, however, researchers realized that external factors
interacted with the underlying genetic programming. Nature
(genes) plus nurture (environment) drove animal behavior. Al
though that statement may seem comprehensive, it is actually
not terribly usefulnature plus nurture includes virtually every
possible influence one can imagine.
Investigators thus began to examine how trial-and-error
learning also shaped behavior. Along with the observations of
field researchers, these studies forced the recognition that animals were much smarter than we gave them credit for: chimps
and crows make and use tools; parrots solve problems using
logic; elephants disable electric fences by dropping large rocks
on them. In the course of studying such obvious intelligence, re
searchers also began to observe that some animals in groups
learned behaviors by copying their group mates. And a particular group member might notice that it was being watched by
others trying to glean information.
Of course, as physicists know, once you get beyond a twobody problem, things can get exceedingly complicated. Early
attempts to study the ways that individuals in a social group
interact thus tended to concentrate on interplay involving two
or three individuals. Scores of studies focused on an animal
copying the mate choice of another, on a group member spying
on the fighting abilities of a potential competitor or on a
scrounger stealing food from a more productive group member.
But the more that ethologists studied such behavior, the more
they realized that these interactions among a few individuals
were just a hint of the intricate set of relationships among all
the members of a group.
What was needed for a fuller understanding of the social
life of animals was the recognition that many animals, just like
we humans, are embedded within complex social networks
the relationships that connect each individual to every other
group member.
HOW IT IS DONE
Modern application o
f this approach began in earnest about
15 years ago, when ethologists started to freely adopt methods
long used by social scientists for the study of human social networksfirst in workplaces or neighborhoods, later in virtual
communities such as Facebook and Twitter.
Social networks in animals range from simple associations
involving only a few individuals, such as a loose shoal of fish
traveling together, to far more complicated configurations, such
MARIE READ Science Source (birds); JOE MCDONALD Getty Images (monkeys); STEPHEN FRINK Getty Images (dolphins)
SOCIAL NETWORK s trength and reach influence everything from mating chances in long-tailed manakins (left), to grooming
in macaques (center), to the propensity of some bottlenose dolphins (right) in Brazil to work with human fishers to catch mullet.
present, the play and grooming networks also underwent complex restructuring.
With police gone, for instance, group members played with
and groomed fewer partners; that is, the degree of their play
and grooming networks decreased. And the reach of the re
maining monkeysthe number of friends of the friends of an
individualwent down in those networks. At the same time, the
cohesion of the entire society weakened; the population underwent a kind of balkanization, dividing into smaller, more homogeneous groups that rarely interacted with outsiders. These
observations led Flack and her colleagues to hypothesize that
the presence of police allowed for a healthier and denser network, where members had more and friendlier contacts with
larger numbers of their fellows.
This kind of knockout experiment, which revealed that some
individuals in a network are especially valuable to its structure,
suggests that an understanding of animal social networks may
be important to conservation biology. Take the case of killer
whales (Orcinus orca). Individual juvenile females and clusters
of related females appear to be key hubs for the transmission of
information about foraging opportunities and other aspects of
life in the sea. Anything people do that disturbs such individuals
or group information hubsfrom hunting to polluting the
oceans to constructing barriers that impede the ability of whales
Clique 1
Clique 2
Clique 3
Fishers
Dolphin 20
benefit for both alpha and beta males, one that all males want
but that few get.
As young males mature between ages one and six, they
often move between perch zones, establishing relationships
with many other males. The average age of a successful breeding male is 10 years, meaning that any given male has many
other males in his social network as he matures. In his nearly
10,000 hours of fieldwork, McDonald tracked which males
interacted with one another each year for more than 10 years.
He built a social network map from his data to see if the structure of the network would reveal which males ended up as successful duet singers.
His network metrics took account of both short pathways
that connected one individual directly to another and indirect
pathways that could include interactions between birds several
links removed from the first individual. (I dont know Bert personally, but I know Kermit, who knows Ernie, who knows Bert.)
McDonald ultimately determined that centrality was the secret:
central males were much more likely than less well-connected
As we previously mentioned, many tools of social network theory were imported from the social sciences. It is unsurprising,
then, that some of the first subjects of detailed nonhuman
social network analysis were bottlenose dolphins, already recognized as big-brained, intelligent, highly social animals, like
us (on our good days).
SOURCE: THE STRUCTURE OF A BOTTLENOSE DOLPHIN SOCIETY IS COUPLED TO A UNIQUE FORAGING COOPERATION
WITH ARTISANAL FISHERMEN, BY F. G. DAURA-JORGE ET AL., IN BIOLOGY LETTERS, VOL. 8, NO. 5; OCTOBER 23, 2012
M O R E TO E X P L O R E
BIRTH OF
A ROCKET
TECHNOLOGY
By David H. Freedman
Deep inside
a giant but
little known
nasa facility,
IN BRIEF
Based on shuttle components and backed most enthusiastically by politicians with home districts that
would benefit, the SLS has been called a rocket to
nowhere, a congressional jobs program with no mission and little chance of actually flying.
a few weeks shuffling through the rusty dust there. That mis
sion is still about 25 years away. But between now and then, the
SLS could carry people to Earths moon and an asteroid and
send a probe to search for life on Europa, one of Jupiters
moons. It is an interplanetarily groundbreaking project, one of
the most audacious nasa has ever undertaken.
Why, then, do so many people seem to hate it?
REPLACING THE SHUTTLE
After the giddy triumph of the Apollo moon exploration pro
gram in the 1960s and early 1970s, the space shuttle was sup
posed to make Earth-orbit access relatively cheap and rou
tine. Instead the shuttle averaged more than $1 billion a trip,
flew only a few times a year and was twice afflicted by catastro
phe. In 2004, a year after the C
olumbia d
isintegrated on reentry,
killing seven people, President George W. Bush charged nasa
with replacing the shuttle with a more Apollo-like program that
launch$10 billion for the rocket itself, $6 billion for the Orion
crew capsule and $2 billion to get Cape Canaveral fitted to han
dle SLS launches. (Incidentally, Senator Bill Nelson of Florida is
another big supporter of the SLS.) But a leaked internal study
came up with a cost of more than $60 billion over the next
10 years. Others predict that delivering a crew to Mars will cost
up to $1 trillion. nasas stated target is $500 million per launch,
but others have put it as high as $14 billion when all program
costs are figured in.
Critics insist that the government and public will never back
their enthusiasm for space exploration with the many hundreds
of billions of dollars the SLSs grandest missions will require.
Several analyses, including one internal study performed by
nasa, have suggested that we can get to deep space and Mars
without a heavy-lift rocket. It might be cheaper, some argue, to
rely on smaller rockets akin to the Delta IV, used for about a
decade to launch satellites, to heft into low-Earth orbit the fuel,
components and materials needed to construct deep-space vehi
cles and then build the big craft there. And if it turns out we do
need a giant rocket, many say, why not turn the job over to socalled new space? SpaceX, the company founded by Silicon Val
TIMELINE
Saturn V
First flight: 1967
Space shuttle
First flight: 1981
Delta IV heavy
First flight: 2004
Ares I
Ares V
Canceled 2010
Falcon heavy
SLS 70t
In development (crew configuration)
In development
SLS 130t
(crew configuration)
In development
BARREL SEGMENTS s tacked and welded together to form a tall cylinder will serve as the shell of the SLSs core stage. Inside
that shell, a tank each of liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen will carry the rockets fuel. At nasas Michoud Assembly Facility,
engineers are now producing confidence barrels to test the strength of the components.
ley icon Elon Musk, has already won orbital ferry contracts with
nasa using its well-regarded Falcon 9 rockets. The SLS is only
adding small incremental improvements to technology devel
oped 40 years ago, says James Pura, president of the Space Fron
tier Foundation, an advocacy group dedicated to advancing
space exploration. nasa ought to tell private industry what sort
of payload it wants to get into deep space, offer a set amount of
money for the job and let companies like SpaceX build it.
SpaceX is developing a 27-engine, SLS-class heavy-lift rocket and
is working on new, more powerful engines that, if successful,
would allow that rocket to outpull even the largest envisioned
SLS. And SpaceX is designing all its major components to be
reusable; the SLS, in contrast, is entirely disposable.
Despite these objections, SLS mission planning is under
way. A 2018 first flight will send a crewless SLS and Orion o
ut
well past the moon, and a second, not yet formally scheduled
flight will do much the same with a crew perhaps a few years
later, taking humans farther from Earth than ever before. What
happens after that will ultimately be up to Congress and a new
president, but right now a crewed asteroid visit is tentatively
planned for the mid-2020s, with a human mission to Mars to
follow in the 2030s.
THE ROCKET FACTORY
NASA tests its biggest rockets at Stennis Space Center, which lies
in a web of lakes, rivers, bayous and canals near the southernmost
tip of Mississippi. As we gear up in hard hats and safety vests, Tom
Byrd, who until his retirement in January was a nasa deputy
manager here, tells me there are three reasons for the centers
proximity to water: the activities at Stennis require access to
large barges, to marine construction expertise and to a ready
way to cool giant slabs of metal exposed to temperatures
approaching those found on the surface of the sun.
Each test stand here is a huge metal-and-concrete structure
that looks something like a cross-sectional slab taken from the
middle of a mega ocean freighter. We climb up through one of
the stands, and along the way I am shown a control room that
would not look out of place in a circa 1950s Soviet power plant
mostly steam gauges and big, clunky dials. I ask why they have
not been upgraded to digital panels. The answer is one that will
prove to be a sort of mantra for the SLS program: it has taken
decades to get this stuff to work well despite unfathomable forc
es and innumerable glitches, so why mess with it?
From the top of the stand, however, I can see that Stennis is
actually awash in upgrades. Canals and roads are being reworked
to handle larger loads, and the test stands themselves are getting
renovations and reinforcements because the SLS is going to sub
ject them to greater stresses than any previous rocket. The forc
es generated here are bigger than during actual launches because
a rocket in the test stand cant escape its own plume, explains
Byrd. Throughout an approximately nine-minute test-firing,
thousands of nozzles will shoot high-pressure jets of water at the
stands wallsnot for cooling but to tamp down ferocious vibra
tions that could otherwise rip the stand apart. Even before the
SLS, no private structure was allowed within 13 kilometers of the
stands because the sound waves alone from a test could shake it
apart. And the SLS engines will generate the most powerful rock
et thrust ever produced on Earth.
Just across the Mississippi-Louisiana border, a few hours
away via canal (or, in my case, 45 minutes by car), sits Michoud,
which I visit the next day. In contrast to the isolation of Stennis,
Michoud is in the middle of an industrial area on the outskirts
of New Orleans. In some ways, Michoud is a factory like any
other, with welding stations, forklifts, cranes and parts bins. It
is just all done on a much larger scale.
Inside, Michoud is gleaming. To tour the complex is to
When the SLS program is in full swing, the aim will be
to turn out at least two rockets a yearpossibly as
many as four. In the rocket world, that is mass produc
tion. But it will grind to a halt if nasa cannot convince
the American public that the SLS is worth building.
The two broadest objectionsthat $18 billion is
too much to spend on a rocket and that we should
focus on sending probes and robots, not humans, into
space to do sciencecan be addressed as matters of
perspective. Eighteen billion dollars is not all that
much for the capability of sending humans to another
planet and back; it cost a third more than that to
improve traffic flow in Boston via the Big Dig. It is
easy to claim there are cheaper ways of doing it, but
nasas success and safety records have set the bar high, and it is
unlikely that the American public would put up with higher
chances of a catastrophic failure in order to shave off what
amounts to a few thousandths of the federal budget.
As for sticking with probes and robots, the case is often made
that the science haul from a human-crewed mission is likely to
be bigger than what a probe or rover can deliver. But the real jus
tification for human spaceflight is to take steps toward expand
ing the human races stomping grounds.
The SLS does have many fans. These supporters include
nasas current leadership and rank and file, a number of space
experts and a growing chunk of the American public, much of
which was thrilled last December by the flawless orbital flight of
the Orion crew capsule that will be sitting atop the SLS when it
heads into deep space. The experts among them can easily
argue, point by point, with the critics.
Use smaller rockets to heft components and fuel into space
for orbital assembly? Some 500 metric tons of materiel will be
needed for a crewed Mars mission, Gerstenmaier calculates. That
is a feat that the SLS could manage in four launches but that
would take at least two dozen launches of a maxed-out DeltaIV.
Gerstenmaier contends that every one of those launches raises
program risk a bit because the worst things are most likely to
happen in the first minute of a mission. The approach is also
more vulnerable to delays, with the effect of stretching out indi
vidual launches cumulatively across all the launches. We used
the many-launches approach with the space shuttle to build the
space station, and it ended up taking decades, he says.
But the most significant potential drawback to a lift-it-insmall-chunks approach, Gerstenmaier says, is the massive amount
MICHOUD WORKERS u
se the segmented ring tool (top left) to make rings that connect domes and barrels. The beer can (top right)
holds barrel segments in place for testing. Workers lift an aluminum panel onto the tool used to assemble the dome-shaped cap of the core
stage (bottom right). At the bottom left is the machine that fabricates the carbon-fiber skin of the Orion capsule the SLS will carry to space.
For 500 seconds on a cool night this past January, one of the
Stennis Space Centers hulking engine tests turned into a fireball.
It was the first test of an R-25 shuttle engine since 2009, and it
went perfectly. If the successful tests keep coming, time may be
on the SLSs side. The longer the program lastsif it remains on
budget and on timethe more it will stand as its own proof of
concept. In its first three years, the program has achieved smooth
and rapid progress, gliding through design reviews and entering
into early manufacturing steps. That is blindingly fast for a
major new human-rated rocket. Only a few glitches have cropped
up; those insulation gaps were just about the worst of them, and
the problem was quickly fixed with a layer of adhesive.
Anything could happen in the years ahead, under new presi
dents and congresses, contends Joan Johnson-Freese, a profes
sor at the U.S. Naval War College who specializes in space. Maybe
the consensus in government will become that we should aban
don Mars for now and focus on setting up a base a little closer to
home. Some in Washington have an almost criminal nostalgia
for the moon, she says. Others think nasa should forget both the
moon and Mars for now and concentrate on asteroids, not only
because they may contain answers to important questions about
the origins of the solar system but also because we might learn
how to divert or destroy any that end up heading toward Earth.
But the allure of Mars remains widespread. Lately that allure
has been building, as it dawns on more people that we could reach
the Red Planet within their lifetime. Wed all like to see us go
there, Parazynski says. Other missions would be a distraction.
He has concerns about the SLS, but not because he thinks it is a
lousy way to get to Mars. He worries that because it will not be
cheap or immediate, we will abandon the SLS before we get there.
At the moment, there are no showstoppers in sight for the
SLS. That claim alone, which cannot be made for any alternative
Mars rocket proposal, may ensure that the project stays the
course. Sure, it was cobbled together from congressional man
dates. Yes, it lacks the innovative verve of rival schemes. But
there is every indication it will work as planned, and it is funded
for the foreseeable future. That should be good enough to make
the SLS the rocket that takes us to Mars. And if it does, the criti
cisms will be quickly forgotten.
M O R E TO E X P L O R E
Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space. C arl Sagan and Ann Druyan.
Random House, 1994.
NASAs Human Path to Mars. W
illiam Gerstenmaier. NASA, 2014. www.nasa.gov/
sites/default/files/files/20140429-Gerstenmaier-Human-Path-Mars.pdf
NASA Strategic Plan 2014. N
ASA, 2014. www.nasa.gov/sites/default/files/files/
FY2014_NASA_SP_508c.pdf
FROM OUR ARCHIVES
To the Moon and Beyond. C harles Dingell, William A. Johns and Julie Kramer White;
October 2007.
s c i e n t i f i c a m e r i c a n . c o m /m a g a z i n e /s a
FORENSIC SCIENCE
THE
MYSTERY
OF CASE
0425
Scientists are identifying the
remains of undocumented
migrants who died crossing
the Mexican borderpeople
whose names would otherwise
have been lost forever
By Ananda Rose
notifying the family. Texas, however, has had trouble coping with
the influx. As other states tighten controls, undocumented migrants have flocked to Texas. Between October 2011 and October
2014, about 685 perished in Texas, compared with some 540 in
California, Arizona and New Mexico combined.
In Brooks County, where the body was found, one in three
residents lives below the poverty line. The county has neither the
infrastructure nor the financial resources to handle the inundation along the border. As a result, remains are often just thrown
into the ground at Sacred Heart and other burial grounds without any attempt to figure out who the deceased were.
When Lori E. Baker, a forensic anthropologist at Baylor University, first heard about the haphazard way that burials were
IN BRIEF
A team of three forensic scientists, along with a cadre of their students, have started to look for remains
in cemeteries in South Texas to identify the deceased
and return them to their families.
PRECEDING PAGES: ISTOCKPHOTO (folder); JOHN MOORE Getty Images (s kull);
COURTESY OF KRISTA LATHAM University of Indianapolis ( g rave marker);
THIS PAGE: JOHN MOORE Getty Images
being carried out at Sacred Heart, she was appalled. Baker, who,
in 2001, helped in Perus investigation of that countrys humanrights abuses, assembled a small team of forensic scientists and
students to exhume the remains of border crossers at Sacred
Heart and identify them.
The group set to work as though they were conducting an archaeological dig. Instead of excavating ruins, they started the
precise and tedious task of digging up and documenting remains and personal effects.
One of the first cases they took up was 0425.
After weeks of digging in the late spring of 2013, the scientists
had unearthed around 70 migrants, far more than expected.
Some turned up in milk crates; others were commingled in a
single body bag. Still others had no grave markers at alleven
simple signs that might have read unknown female were missing. We know that we must always expect the unexpected,
wrote Krista Latham of the groups informal motto in a 2014
post on a blog called Beyond Borders. Latham directs the University of Indianapolis Molecular Anthropology Laboratory and
had volunteered to be one of the team leaders.
Latham brought four graduate students with her to Brooks
County. The working conditions were challenging. In addition to
the heat and humidityand the spiders, scorpions, snakes and
fire antsthere was a complete absence of maps or notes of any
kind documenting the number and nature of the burials. We
did not know if they were buried in a wooden box that would
protect them or just in plastic, Latham says. So we had to go
very slowly and use small hand tools in order to not potentially
damage the remains.
The team created a grid system at the cemetery using string.
The scientists measured the distance from any point where excavations were taking place, aboveground or belowground, to a
fixed point on the grid. In that way, they could make a record of
C OLD CASE S
SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN ONLINE Watch a video by Pilar Timpane about forensic anthropology in Texas at ScientificAmerican.com/jun2015/forensic-anthro
ence source. Most of the data come from late 19th- and early
20th-century skeleton collections of European-Americans and
African-Americans from the U.S. The lack of data means that the
ancestry of Hispanics often stays a mystery in forensic investigations. In the worst cases, attempts to determine ancestry can
lead to utter confusion. Methods for a person considered white,
when applied to an individual considered [a male] Hispanic, will
usually provide a sex assessment of female, Spradley says. If
sex isnt right, no one will be identified.
Whereas skull measurements Spradley took for 0425 revealed her ancestry as probable Hispanic, that designation
failed to pin down whether the woman came from Mexico, Guatemala, El Salvador or Chileor whether in the case of, say, a
Mexican, her home was in Oaxaca or Veracruz. Also missing was
any means of classifying ethnic or tribal groupsMaya, Zapotec, Xinca, Lenca, Afro-Colombian, and so on. Spradley has been
trying to address the need for better comparative data by documenting differences in bone structure and genetic markers of
ancestry for immigrants of Central American origin who make
up most of the fatalities in South Texas. She is bringing together
records on border-crossing fatalities from the Pima County Office of the Medical Examiner in Tucson, Ariz., two documented
cemetery collections from Mexico and records on victims of human-rights violations during Guatemalas civil war.
Spradley uses this information to classify differences in skull
size and shapesay, between Mexicans and Guatemalans. These
specifics then go into the Forensic Anthropology Data Bank
(FDB), co-founded in the 1980s by Spradleys graduate adviser,
Richard Jantz of the University of Tennessee Knoxville. The data
will ultimately help make it easier to pin down where migrants
such as 0425 began their journey.
A CHEEK SWAB, A POSITIVE ID
P U B L I C H E A LT H
THE
DENGUE
STOPPER
Scientists are
immunizing
mosquitoes
against disease
with the help
of a common
microbe
By Scott ONeill
dengue. We actually have had to infect those mosquitoes artificially, in the laboratory. In other words, we use Wolbachia t o immunize the mosquitoes against dengue and then set them loose
in the wild, where (we hope) those mosquitoes will pass the bacterium to their offspring. Wolbachia i s largely benign for mosquitoes and the environment, although it may reduce the insects
egg production. But the potential benefits for humans are clear:
if mosquitoes infected with Wolbachia b
ecome predominant in
the wild, we expect dengue infection rates among people to drop.
P EST CONTROL
Mosquitoes are among the deadliest creatures on earth. Yellow
fever, also transmitted by A. aegypti, took out more U.S. troops
than enemy fire during the Spanish-American War in 1898. Malaria, transmitted by a parasite harbored in mosquitoes, killed
approximately 627,000 people in 2012 alone. Now A
. aegypti is
rapidly spreading dengue around the globe. About half of the
worlds population is at risk of contracting the disease, according to the World Health Organization. A
.aegypti, w
hich is recognizable by the white stripes on its legs and the lyre pattern on its
thorax, can breed in any pool of standing water, which makes it
particularly hard to control. The mosquito is found in tropical
and subtropical climates around the worldin Africa, the Americas, the Eastern Mediterranean, Southeast Asia and the Western Pacific. Dengue, however, does not naturally occur in these
creatures: the mosquitoes get dengue from us.
The mechanism of dengue infection is simple. Female mos-
IN BRIEF
mosquitoes to mate and pass the bacterium to future generations. If the method works, vast numbers of wild mosquitoes will eventually carry Wolbachia a nd
thus be unable to transmit dengue.
JAMES GATHANY Getty Images (r ed mosquito); CHRISTOPHE SIMON Getty Images (larvae, net cages and release)
H OW TO INFECT MOSQUITOES
Imagine taking a knitting needle and poking it into a balloon.
Next, you have to remove the needle without popping the balloon. That pretty well sums up the process of infecting mosquito eggs with W
olbachia. I n the lab, my team uses microscopic
needles to take the microbe from the fruit fly and inject it directly into young mosquito eggs. At first, like balloons pierced
with knitting needles, the eggs would burst. We tried with
many thousands of eggs before we were successful.
BASICS
Uninfected
female
Infected female
+ infected male
Infected female
+ uninfected male
Infected
mosquitoes
Infected
mosquitoes
Bites
human
infected
with
dengue
virus
Uninfected female
+ infected male
Eggs
Unhatched
eggs
Infected
female
Dengue virus
replicates
in mosquito
Dengue virus
does not
replicate
Dengue spreads
via bite
Dengue does
not spread
Once we managed to infect mosquito eggs without destroying them, we had other problems to solve. W
olbachia w
ould often disappear after a generation or two of mosquito breeding,
which meant there was no way the bacterium would spread in
the wild the way we wanted it to. We eventually found that we
had to condition the microbes before injecting them into mosquitoesto get these bacteria, which were used to living in
fruit flies, accustomed to their new hosts. To do so, we extracted W
olbachia from fruit flies and then grew it in mosquito cell
lines. In 2005 we finally prevailed: we infected mosquitoes with
Wolbachia and watched them pass the bacterium from generation to generation13 in all. Since then, W
olbachia h
as flourished in all subsequent generations. As we expected, at least
one strain of Wolbachia shortens the life of A
.aegypti.
Yet it turns out that W
olbachia is even better at fighting dengue than we thought. For reasons we do not fully understand,
the dengue virus has trouble growing in W
olbachia-infected
mosquitoes. We figured this out a few years after successfully
transplanting Wolbachia into A. aegypti, when separate work
I had been part of revealed that in fruit flies the bacterium also
proaches to mosquito control. One entails releasing male mosquitoes that have been genetically modified so that the sperm
cells of males carry a lethal gene. When those mosquitoes mate
with females in the wild, their offspring die. This approach is
innovative and potentially powerful, but it could also be costly.
To be effective on a large scale, it could be necessary to constantly release modified mosquitoes; otherwise, unmodified
mosquitoes from surrounding areas would move into the area
and replenish the population. The use of transgenic mosquitoes
also faces strong opposition from critics of genetic modification.
In contrast, the costs of W
olbachia-based dengue control
are front-loaded: after the initial investment in bacterium-
infected mosquitoes, the process takes care of itself. It could be
a relatively inexpensive way to tackle dengue, which is especially important in the poor tropical countries where the disease is
most prevalent. Another benefit of our approach is that it involves no gene modificationalthough it still took years to get
off the ground because of the work necessary to assure communities of its safety.
We still have a significant hurdle ahead of us: measuring the
reduction in dengue that occurs when we introduce W
olbachia
into communities. This step will be difficult for several reasons.
In the areas where we work, reliable data on dengue cases are
largely nonexistent, and infection rates can vary widely from
year to year. To firmly establish the effectiveness of our method,
we will need to compare dengue rates in areas where we have
released Wolbachia m
osquitoes against those where we have
not. Doing so will require taking lots of blood samples, which
will be laborious.
Yet we believe the work will be worthwhile and not only for
fighting dengue. These mosquitoesor rather the microbes in
side themshow promise against other diseases as well. We
have seen evidence that Wolbachia may also reduce the ability
of mosquitoes to transmit chikungunya, which first appeared
in the mainland U.S. last July, and yellow fever. Researchers are
also attempting to use Wolbachia-infected mosquitoes to slow
the transmission of malaria and lymphatic filariasis, a profoundly disfiguring disease caused by worms.
The new observations are exciting. For the time being, however, our group will remain focused on evaluating the method
against dengue. It is where we first started our research and
where we are closest to seeing a real-world impact. One day, we
hope, a mosquito bite will leave nothing more consequential than
an itchy bump.
M O R E TO E X P L O R E
American Genius
National Geographic
Channel. Premiering
June 1
Behind many historic
inventionsflight,
electricity, personal computersare
tales of heated rivalries that spurred the
inventors on. This television miniseries
profiles the competitions of such geni
uses as the Wright brothers and Glenn
Curtiss, Nikola Tesla and Thomas Edison,
and Steve Jobs and Bill Gates. Actors
convey the intensity of the feuds, and
interviews with experts illuminate the
characters and the science that made
the innovations possible. The eight-part
docudrama reminds us that sometimes
the brightest minds need a competitive
nudge to reach greatness.
How to Bake
:
An Edible Exploration
of the Mathematics
of Mathematics
cientia
S
Humanitatis
Reason, empiricism and skepticism
are not virtues of science alone
In the late 20th century t he humanities took a turn toward postmodern deconstruction and the belief that there is no objective
reality to be discovered. To believe in such quaint notions as scientific progress was to be guilty of scientism, properly said with
a snarl. In 1996 New York University physicist Alan Sokal punctured these pretensions with his now famous article Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of
Quantum Gravity, chockablock full of postmodern phrases and
deconstructionist tropes interspersed with scientific jargon,
which he subsequently admitted were nonsensical gibberish.
I subsequently gave up on the humanities but am now reconsidering my position after an encounter this past March with University of Amsterdam humanities professor Rens Bod during a
European book tour for The Moral Arc. In our dialogue, Bod
pointed out that my definition of sciencea set of methods that
describes and interprets observed or inferred phenomena, past or
present, aimed at testing hypotheses and building theoriesapplies to such humanities fields as philology, art history, musicology, linguistics, archaeology, historiography and literary studies.
Indeed, I had forgotten the story he recounted of Italian philologist Lorenzo Valla, who in 1440 exposed the Latin document Donatio Constantinithe Donation of Constantine, which was used
by the Catholic Church to legitimize its land grab of the Western
Roman Empireas a fake. Valla used historical, linguistic and
philological evidence, including counterfactual reasoning, to rebut the document, Bod explained. One of the strongest pieces of
evidence he came up with was lexical and grammatical: Valla
Gold Flush
A cloud with a silver lining
pales next to solid waste
laced with gold
You cant make a silk purse o
ut of a sows ear.
You cant make chicken salad out of chickenshall
we agree we know what word goes at the end of
that saying? Its also been thought impossible to,
as the Yiddish expression has it, makhn gold fun
drek: make gold fromsure enough, its that same
word again.
It remains true that you cant m
ake gold from
feces. But it turns out you can extract enough gold
from solid waste to possibly make the effort pay.
This excremental explication was performed by
one Kathleen Smith, a researcher with the U.S.
Geological Survey, at an American Chemical Society meeting held in late March in Denver. The
meeting was billed as Chemistry of Natural Resources, which
includes the stuff produced when nature calls.
Smith has had what appears to be, based on her authorship
of nearly 100 scientific publications, a long and distinguished
career. She has now discovered that papers with titles such as
her Trace-Metal Sources and Their Release from Mine Wastes:
Examples from Humidity Cell Tests of Hard-Rock Mine Waste
and from Warrior Basin Coal garner far less media attention
than do press releases headlined SewageYes, PoopCould
Be a Source of Valuable Metals and Critical Elements. (Smiths
conference presentation was called Metal Occurrence in and
Potential Recovery from Municipal Biosolids, which we journalist types would probably have ignored, too, to be honest.)
Before we talk about getting the gold out, lets consider how
it got in. Most of us are not dining on gold-leaf-covered ice
cream, like the kind in the $1,000 sundaes at the New York City
restaurant Serendipity 3 (the wealthy customer being the serene dip). Nor are most of us spending more than $400 on a pill
filled with shards of gold leaf, the sole purpose of which is to
eventually make ones bowel movement, no joke, glitter. A commenter to the online news article discussing this pill helpfully
wrote, You dont need to pay that much. My kid has glittery
poos every time he does arts and crafts . . . just eat regular glitter, it works just fine.
Geophagysnacking on small amounts of dirtis a common
practice in some regions. But a 2014 paper in the journal B
MC
Pregnancy and Childbirth d
id not find any gold in soil preferred
by pregnant women in Tanzania, where eating earth is believed
to alleviate morning sicknesseven though the study was done
June 1965
Interior of
the Earth
Our experiments
with the 90:10 ironnickel alloy and
extrapolations from these results in
dicate that under the assumed high
pressures and temperatures of the
earths core the density of the alloy
is about 10percent less than that of
pure iron. Our density values for this
alloy agree with the density of the core,
as estimated by K. E. Bullen of the
University of Sydney and Francis Birch
of Harvard University on the basis of
seismic data, the moment of inertia
and the earths mass. We conclude,
therefore, that the earths core probably
consists of iron-nickel alloys and is
similar in composition to the ironnickel meteorites.
June 1915
The Greatest
Invention?
June 1865
Interior of
the Earth
Messrs Editors
For my own part
I have quite a golden ideathat the interior of the earth is abundantly supplied
with, if not mainly composed of, gold, platinum and other precious metals. If we
A VIEW OF CIVILIZATION
fter 70years of invention, 1915
a
Varnish Ingredient
The purest and best gum copal
in the world is found on the mainland of Africa, near Zanzibar. It
is, without doubt, a fossil gum.
It is dug from the earth by Africans, and by them carried to
the Banian [Indian] trader, in
small quantities, for sale. When
it reaches Zanzibar, it is in a very
dirty state, and requires much
sifting and garbling before it is
merchantable; it is then cleansed
with a solution of soda-ash and
lime, put up carefully in boxes,
when it is ready for the home
market. That it is a gum may be
proved from the fact of its rough
or goose-skin surface, which no
doubt is an impression of the
sand or earth when it ran down
from the tree in a soft state. Pieces, too, are found with sticks,
leaves, and insects preserved in
them in the most perfect state.
Graphic Science
Twists of Fate
Genes, traits and disease are linked in complex and surprising ways
Our genes are not t he last word on disease risk or other traits.
Myriad control switches help to arbitrate how genes get expressed in different cells and tissues, and those switches are often triggered by maternal diet, toxic exposures and many other
environmental factors. To begin to understand what drives these
complex epigenetic effects, scientists analyzed 150 billion bits
of genomic data from more than 100 human tissues and cells
brain, heart, bone, and so forth.
The first step was to locate the switches by analyzing specific
chemical modifications on the DNA and the proteins that it
wraps around. Then researchers took data comparing individuals
who have specific biological traits with those who do not to see
which traits are associated with which switches. The result is an
epigenomic road map that links diseases and traits (red dots)
with the locations in the body (white dots) of the switches most
correlated with those features; thicker lines correspond to more
robust links. This blueprint should come in handy in sussing out
the molecular basis of human variation and disease and in discovering potential new treatments.
Dina Fine Maron
SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN ONLINE
For more graphics about human genetics, see ScientificAmerican.com/jun2015/graphic-science
Type 1
diabetes
Graves
disease
Crohns
disease
Celiac
disease
Alzheimers Self-reported
allergy
disease
Primary
T cells
Lymphoblastoid
cells
Spleen
Rectum
Colon
Primary
B cells
Ulcerative colitis
Rheumatoid arthritis
Multiple sclerosis
Preeclampsia (a preg
nancy-induced hyper
tensive condition) is
linked with bone tissue
Brain
Thymus
Muscle
Skin
Multiple
myeloma
Height
HDL
cholesterol
Duodenum
Adipocytes
Stomach
Intestine
Preeclampsia
ADHD
Liver
Stem cells
Bone
Fasting glucose
related traits
Pancreas
Key
LDL cholesterol
Blood pressure
Type 2
diabetes
Breast cancer
predisposition
Heart
Precancerous
liver cells
1 (strongest)
23
45
610
11+
Strength of relation
Extremely signicant
Signicant
Almost reached signicance
SOURCE: INTEGRATIVE ANALYSIS OF 111 REFERENCE HUMAN EPIGENOMES, BY ROADMAP EPIGENOMICS CONSORTIUM ET AL., IN NATURE, V
OL. 518; FEBRUARY 19, 2015
Adverse chemotherapy
response
Although Alzheimers
disease is a disorder
of the brain, it is most
strongly related to
regulatory switches
of the immune system,
suggesting a possible
causal link