American Scientist - Living With Fire

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THE WORLD’S NEWSSTAND ® 

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THE WORLD’S NEWSSTAND ®



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AMERICAN 

 

 

Departments 

194 From the Editors 

195 Letters to the Editors 

198 Spotlight 

The latest member of the human 

family tree Power from radioactive 

isotopes Briefings 

204 Infographic 

Reducing automobile emissions 

206 Sightings 

A computed flame 

208 Arts Lab 

The art and science of solar eclipses 

Richard Woo 

212 Perspective 

The tales we all must tell 

Robert Louis Chianese 

216 Engineering 

How paperweights emerged from 

the desk of necessity 

Henry Petroski 

Scientists’ 

Nightstand 

248 Book Reviews 

DNA and poetry The poisons of 

Agatha Christie Fireflies up close 

From Sigma Xi 

253 Sigma Xi Today 

Annual Meeting in Atlanta 

Student Research Showcase results 

Sigma Xi sponsors the Conrad Spirit 

of Innovation Challenge Award 

winner interviews 

Feature Articles 

220 

220 Coexisting with Wildfire 

Promoting the right kind of fire is safer 

and more cost-effective. 

Max A. Moritz and 

Scott Gabriel Knowles 

228 A Constructive Chemical 

Conversation 

Interventions let researchers grow 

complex microscale structures. 

Alison Grinthal, Wim L. Noorduin, 

and Joanna Aizenberg 

228 

234 The Road Ahead 

Smart cars, smart bridges, and smart 

highways may make infrastructure safer 

and more robust. 


242 G. Evelyn Hutchinson’s Exultation 

in Natural History 

This proponent of experimental work 

nonetheless loved organismal description. 

Laura J. Martin 

242 

234 

The Cover 

The 2012 Waldo Canyon Fire in Colorado Springs, Colorado, was the worst wildfire in the state’s history. Shown here burning out 

of control on June 26, three days after the fire began, it ultimately lasted 18 days, blazing through more than 18,000 acres of public 

and private land, destroying 347 homes, and killing two people. In “Coexisting with Wildfire” (pages 220–227), fire ecologist Max 

A. Moritz and historian Scott Gabriel Knowles describe the state of research on safety and damage prevention in the face of wildfires, 

dispelling common misconceptions that they say may be holding back proactive policy and contributing to reactively fighting fires. 

The authors pose solutions that they think could save lives, homes, and taxpayer money. (Photograph by R. J. Sangosti.) 



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FROM THE EDITORS 

Overcoming the Bystander Effect 

Have you ever been a hero? Going about our 

daily routines, few of us have the opportunity 

to save a life or disrupt a crime in progress—fewer 

still take that opportunity when it presents itself. I 

once witnessed a car accident in which the guilty 

party leapt from his disabled vehicle and fled 

the scene. I quickly pulled over and dialed 911. 

Fortunately, another passerby stopped and apprehended 

the suspect. The culprit—who was clearly 

intoxicated—struggled to escape, but he was easily 

overpowered. After emergency personnel arrived, I 

drove away contemplating the other witness’s bravery 

and how I could have done more. 

Not only are acts of heroism unsurprisingly rare, reports about observers who, 

out of indifference or perplexity, fail to report criminal behavior or respond to 

emergencies with inaction are common. Although it may be tempting to blame 

the desensitizing effects of our media- and technology-saturated age, the failure 

of witnesses to take action isn’t a new phenomenon. 

Psychologists Bibb Latané and John Darley identified a pattern of behavior they 

called the bystander effect, which they demonstrated in their labs for the first time 

in 1968. They describe it as a behavior that occurs when the presence of others 

discourages an individual from intervening in an emergency situation. Latané 

and Darley were spurred to their studies by the 1964 murder of Kitty Genovese in 

New York City, a case that became infamous because of observers’ inaction. 

Today the bystander effect is being revisited in the context of human-imposed 

environmental threats, including climate change. There’s plenty of evidence that 

the conditions we’re observing—from multi-year water shortages to massive, 

deforestation-related mudslides to plummeting biological diversity—are dire. 

Yet the severity of these threats isn’t being met with proportionally urgent action. 

A number of options exist to help us overcome what in this case appears to be 

bystander effect on a massive scale. For example, by openly making sustainable 

decisions, we can demonstrate helping behavior, which can inspire others to follow 

suit. We can also make a difference by educating people on sustainable living 

and by helping people form a close relationship with nature. As key sources 

of useful information related to environmental management, scientists and engineers 

can play a special role as educators and problem solvers. 

In this issue, you’ll find articles that collectively serve as a blueprint for researchers 

to use in leading this effort. In “The Tales We All Must Tell” (pages 

212–215), Robert Chianese encourages all of us to own up to our environmental 

transgressions and atone for them by sharing personal confessions; in “Coexisting 

with Wildfire” (pages 220–227), Max Moritz and Scott Knowles offer immediate 

solutions by acknowledging the inevitable escalation of wildfire incidences 

brought on by global warming and by explaining how we can plan and build 

communities that minimize our losses; and in “G. Evelyn Hutchinson’s Exultation 

in Natural History” (pages 242–247), Laura Martin recounts the career of 

this famed ecologist and storied American Scientist columnist and suggests that 

his passion for the natural world is an example all scientists can follow to serve 

humankind today. 

It’s clear we can no longer afford to be indifferent to these concerns. Scientists 

and engineers are in the unique position of both possessing the most actionable 

information and having the tools and capacity to act. Research has shown that 

observing prosocial behavior can motivate others to do the same. In other words, 

heroism is potentially contagious. 

After later discovering that the hero from that other car was an off-duty police 

officer, I realized that even an act performed by a professional could instill a greater 

sense of humanity in me. For the sake of preserving our planet, the scientific 

community can be the example we all need. —Jamie L. Vernon (@JLVernonPhD) 

AMERICAN 

Scientist 

www.americanscientist.org 

VOLUME 104, NUMBER 4 

Editor-in-Chief Jamie L. Vernon 

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194 American Scientist, Volume 104 



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LETTERS 

Habitability Criteria 

To the Editors: 

Concerning the Perspective column 

“The Imprecise Search for Extraterrestrial 

Habitability” by Kevin Heng in 

the May–June issue, it seems to me 

that the focus on surface temperature 

as a habitability criterion for exoplanets 

considers only one aspect, and perhaps 

it is not even the most important 

prerequisite for life. What is life but a 

heat engine, producing a local reduction 

in entropy? 

Thermodynamics suggests that the 

key element to an efficient cycle is the 

availability of a “hot” reservoir and 

a “cold” one. For example, on Earth 

we receive blackbody radiation from 

the Sun at 5,780 kelvin and radiate 

blackbody radiation out to space at 

255 kelvin. Net energy gain or loss is 

roughly zero because we are in thermal 

equilibrium, but life builds ordered 

systems using the difference in 

entropy between the two reservoirs. It 

follows that a planet orbiting a redder 

star would be more limited in capacity 

to support life, even with a surface 

temperature similar to Earth’s, 

and conversely a bluer star could 

provide a more encouraging environment. 

I am curious why the current 

habitability criteria do not take this 

point into account, even though stellar 

spectral data are more readily available 

than surface temperature data for 

exoplanets. I have even seen articles 

speculating that rogue planets with 

only internal heating could support 

life if they are at the correct temperature, 

but my understanding of thermodynamics 

argues against that likelihood 

(but doesn’t rule it out; some life 

here exploits thermal gradients near 

underwater geothermal vents). 

Russ Howard 

Frederick, CO 

Dr. Heng responds: 

Dr. Howard touches on a point that has 

been explored extensively in the astrophysical 

literature: the climatic effects 

arising from variations in the incident 

flux associated with different types of 

stars. (For a recent example, see the 

June 2015 article by S. Rugheimer and 

colleagues in The Astrophysical Journal.) 

Sunlike stars radiate roughly with a 

blackbody spectrum that peaks in the 

visible (at 0.5 microns). Red dwarfs (M 

stars), on the other hand, have blackbody 

spectra that peak in the near infrared 

(around 1 micron), and there 

has been constructive speculation on 

the consequences of the difference for 

photosynthesis. 

Because of a temperature inversion 

in Earth’s atmosphere, where cold air 

is trapped under warmer air at higher 

altitudes, water is confined near the 

surface. But because ozone is a good 

absorber of ultraviolet and optical radiation 

but a poorer absorber of nearinfrared 

radiation, this so-called cold 

trap would not operate in the atmosphere 

of an Earth analogue irradiated 

by a red dwarf. Generally, the situation 

is more complicated than Earth 

radiating as a 255-kelvin blackbody, 

because sources of absorption and scattering 

from both gaseous and aerosol 

species need to be taken into account 

to properly compute the atmospheric 

temperatures. It is probably an oversimplification 

to imagine that life 

is more likely in environments that 

have larger temperature gradients. A 

counterargument is that blue stars (for 

example, the short-lived O stars) live 

only for millions—rather than billions— 

of years, and one may speculate about 

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ONLINE @ 

_________________________ 

The Long Haul 

Plants with shorter lifespans tend 

to be better studied in evolutionary 

biology and population ecology, 

because research lasting longer 

than five years takes patience, 

planning, perseverance after 

setbacks, and reliable funding. 

In this guest blog post, Carolyn 

Beans highlights ecologists who 

have set out into this unexplored 

research territory. 

http://bit.ly/1ZxwdeU 

Exploring the Dark Net 

In this edition of the Scientists’ 

Nightstand podcast, author Jamie 

Bartlett discusses his book The 

Dark Net, in which market mechanisms, 

technology, ethics, and 

human behavior mix. 

http://bit.ly/1VQD8Su 

Fire’s Weird Behavior in Space 

In the microgravity environment 

of outer space, flames burn 

very differently than they do on 

Earth. Studying these differences 

not only helps researchers grasp 

the properties of combustion 

and burning but also is crucial 

for outer-space missions. Explore 

these insights through striking 

visuals in this slideshow. 

http://bit.ly/1UN9Tif 

The Promise of 2D Materials 

In this live video discussion about 

materials that are only one molecule 

thick, Cornell University chemist Michael 

G. Spencer and managing editor 

Fenella Saunders talk about how 

materials such as graphene are (and 

are not) living up to their promise for 

use in electronics and other areas. 

http://bit.ly/1ObOKgi 

Strategies to Curb Bacterial Infections 

How can bacterial infections be 

stopped? What about bacterial resistance? 

To what extent are bacteria 

“communicating” with one another 

to overcome our immune systems, 

chemical cleansers, and antibiotics? 

Purdue University chemist Herman 

Sintim and managing editor Fenella 

Saunders discuss these questions in 

this live video interview. 

http://bit.ly/1VQEgp3 

The Chemical Origins of Life 

In this live video interview, biochemist 

Nick Hud and digital features editor 

Katie L. Burke discuss the structures of 

biopolymers—the building blocks of 

amino acids—and the ongoing efforts 

to try to tease apart the process of the 

earliest evolution of life on Earth. 

http://bit.ly/1qziQik 

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whether this time frame is long enough 

for life to develop and evolve. 

Much has also been said about the 

stability of these environments to flares 

and outbursts from the star (linked to 

its magnetic activity). Such flares and 

outbursts together have negligible energies 

compared to the star’s continuous 

energy output, but they may have 

outsized effects on any biology residing 

on the surface of the exoplanet. 

(For an example, see the October 2010 

article in Astrobiology by A. Segura and 

others.) All of these thoughts remain 

speculative until one can actually construct 

a working model of how life 

forms and exploits energy from its surroundings, 

robustly generalizable to 

environments beyond that of Earth. 

It is perhaps premature to construct 

“habitability criteria.” 

At the end of the day, I would say 

that data are king: We, as astrophysicists, 

would mostly like to think about 

ideas that may be falsified by astronomical 

data. Some thoughts, although 

plausible, may remain outside of the 

realm of falsifiability, at least in the 

foreseeable future. Rogue exoplanets, 

adrift from their stars, may harbor 

internal heat sources that are warm 

enough to support life. (See Dorian Abbot’s 

and Eric Switzer’s 2011 article in 

The Astrophysical Journal Letters.) Another 

variation on this idea is the “deep 

hot biosphere” (as per Thomas Gold), 

which suggests that a hidden biosphere 

of microbial life exists many kilometers 

beneath our feet, with a biomass that 

rivals its surface counterpart. Even if 

such deep hot biospheres are prevalent 

among exoplanets, they would essentially 

be invisible to the telescopes of 

astronomers and thus would fall outside 

the realm of ideas that are testable 

by current scientific methods. 

Past Stoplight Sequences 

To the Editor: 

I enjoyed Henry Petroski’s Engineering 

column on traffic lights, “Traffic Signals, 

Dilemma Zones, and Red-Light 

Cameras” (May–June). Some time ago 

I was asked by a New York City driver 

(via the Brooklyn College physics department) 

to determine whether the 

yellow lights were unreasonably short 

on a city street where he had gotten a 

red-light ticket. Indeed, New Yorkers 

often complain that yellow-light times 

are set too short and even accuse the 

city of doing this deliberately to pro- 




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duce revenue. After determining the 

formula for Y, the minimum yellowlight 

time, I realized that its value 

depends critically on two quite questionable 

parameters: the braking time 

and the reaction time. In particular, the 

latter—the time from perceiving the 

yellow signal to pressing the brake— 

depends on the driver’s age. Although 

one second is reasonable for a young 

driver, it would be at least double that 

for a driver in his 60s, and this difference 

does imply that yellow-light 

times (set nominally at three seconds 

in New York City) are in fact less than 

the minimum. 

Michael I. Sobel 

Professor Emeritus of Physics 

Brooklyn College 

Brooklyn, NY 


Henry Petroski’s informative Engineering 

column about traffic signals 

reminded me of two techniques that 

I no longer see in the United States. 

One is a change from green to the 

intermediate half green and half yellow 

before the wholly yellow light, 

which was more common in the United 

States a half century ago. This sequence 

does not require more lights 

and provides more time to prepare for 

the red one without causing a “loss of 

drivers’ respect for the yellow light.” 

The second technique I used to see is 

Illustration Credits 

Spotlight 

Page 199 Barbara Aulicino 

Infographic 

Page 204 Andy Brunning 

G. Evelyn Hutchinson’s Exultation 

in Natural History 

Page 243 Stephanie A. Freese 

The Art of Chemical Conversation 

Pages 230–235 Barbara Aulicino 

a change from red to the intermediate 

half red and half yellow before the 

green light, a sequence often seen in 

Europe. This series alerts drivers to 

be ready to go when the light is green, 

so traffic flows as soon as the light is 

green, permitting more cars to pass 

through the intersection. 

M. Craig Pinsker 

Glen Allen, VA 

A Crusty Englishman 


Tony Rothman’s article about the 

founding and development of the National 

Radio Astronomy Observatory 

(NRAO), “Outpost on the Edge” (Perspective, 

January–February), brought 

back memories of several visits I 

made to Green Bank, West Virginia, in 

1977–1980 to discuss the development 

of a geodetic very-long-baseline interferometry 

(VLBI) network to monitor 

polar motion, variations in universal 

time, and tectonic plate movements. 

I was working at the National Oceanic 

and Atmospheric Administration 

(NOAA) and was trying to get a 

project going: POLARIS (POLar motion 

Analysis by Radio Interferometric 

Surveying), a collaboration with 

NASA and the U.S. Naval Observatory. 

On one of my visits I happened 

upon John Findlay. Rothman’s description 

of him as a “crusty Englishman 

who spoke with an Oxbridge 

accent and smoothed down his hair 

with shoe polish” caused an instant 

flashback to my first—and only— 

encounter with Findlay. 

I went to the lounge after dinner. 

He came in, carrying a mixed drink, 

and sat down in an overstuffed chair 

across a coffee table from me. Findlay 

said hello and asked why I was 

at Green Bank. After listening to my 

brief description of project POLARIS, 

he harrumphed as only the English 

can and proceeded to tell me that he 

saw no need for such a special purpose 

VLBI network, as everything we 

proposed to do could be done better 

with the Very Long Baseline Array 

(VLBA). When I responded that the 

baselines would not be long enough 

to get the Earth orientation parameters 

as accurately as we were seeking, and 

that we also wanted stations on several 

different tectonic plates, he harrumphed 

again and told me that the 

array would eventually include satellite 

stations, most likely in Hawaii, 

Alaska, and the Caribbean Islands, 

and perhaps other locations. He went 

on to say that he had never heard of 

me and had no idea why a geodesist 

thought that he could run an astronomical 

observing program. As an 

afterthought, he asked from where I 

had come. Because he had mentioned 

Hawaii as a possible site for a VLBI 

station, I assumed that he knew John 

T. Jefferies, director of the Institute for 

Astronomy, University of Hawaii, and 

told him that I had worked for him, 

building a lunar laser ranging station 

on Haleakala before accepting a position 

at NOAA. 

Findlay feigned trying to place the 

name John Jefferies and then said that 

he did not know him. I replied that he 

would certainly get to know Jefferies 

if NRAO was going to build a radio 

telescope in Hawaii, as the governor 

and state legislators looked to him for 

everything astronomical. That set him 

off on a rant about minor university 

professors and local politicians in remote 

states that were little more than 

remote colonies, who thought that 

they were important. He concluded by 

informing me that the VLBA was a national 

project, that all decisions would 

be made by the appropriate National 

Science Foundation and NRAO officials, 

who would neither need nor 

seek the opinions and help of Jefferies 

or local politicians, including the governor. 

With that said, he picked up his 

drink and left. 

I saw him a couple more times during 

other visits to Green Bank, but he 

never deigned to speak to me again. 

I am pleased to learn that he made 

significant contributions to radio astronomy 

during his time at NRAO— 

unfortunately, I only experienced his 

“crusty Englishman” side. 

Bill Carter 

University of Houston 

Houston, TX 

How to Write to American Scientist 

Brief letters commenting on articles 

appearing in the magazine are welcomed. 

The editors reserve the right 

to edit submissions. Please include 

an email address if possible. Address: 

Letters to the Editors, P.O. Box 13975, 

Research Triangle Park, NC 27709 or 

_________________ 

editors@amscionline.org. 

www.americanscientist.org 2016 July–August 197 



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Spotlight 

The Latest on Homo naledi 

A recent addition to the human family tree doesn’t 

fit in clearly yet. 

The Rising Star cave system, part of 

the Cradle of Humankind World Heritage 

Site in South Africa, has been well 

mapped and was explored by cavers 

for many years, but without any fossils 

being noted there. That changed 

in September 2013, when two South 

African cavers, Rick Hunter and Steve 

Tucker, entered a remote, unmapped 

chamber and found the first-known 

fossil bones of what is now called Homo 

naledi strewn across its floor. Hunter 

and Tucker were working with South 

African paleoanthropologist Lee Berger, 

hoping to identify new cave settings 

with evidence of our fossil ancestors 

and relatives. Berger quickly organized 

an excavation to explore the contents 

of the extremely difficult-to-access site, 

named Dinaledi Chamber. 

Since the discovery, I have been privileged 

to be a member of the scientific 

team investigating the find. The remote 

chamber would prove to contain a bone 

bed of an extinct population, more than 

1,500 fossil specimens of which have 

been located so far—one of the most 

significant finds in the history of studying 

human evolution. That remarkable 

discovery has rippled excitement 

throughout the anthropological community, 

not least because the species’ 

traits do not make clear where it fits 

into the human evolutionary tree. 

Our work describing these fossils as 

the new species H. naledi has been carried 

out by a large international team 

of specialists, and the description of the 

species that we published last year is just 

the first chapter of a long scientific story. 

We assembled a team of scientists to 

encompass specialists in different aspects 

of the anatomy of the body, who 

could contribute extensive data sets and 

experience to the project. At the same 

time, we tried to broaden the set of people 

involved in the description of new 

hominin fossils, by including members 

of the next generation. We were able to 

accept applications from more than 30 

early-career scientists, representing 15 

countries and 5 continents. The high 

level of commitment of this team of specialists 

allowed us to develop an initial 

understanding of the overall sample 

within two years of its discovery. 

With Berger, I helped organize a symposium 

to describe our ongoing work 

at the April meeting of the American 

Association of Physical Anthropologists 

in Atlanta. The session gave an opportunity 

for 13 members of our team, 

mostly early-career scientists, to present 

ongoing and unpublished work to 

colleagues from around the world. We 

aimed to provide a comprehensive view 

of the biology of this new species, with 

presentations covering every part of the 

body, literally from head to toe. This research 

begins to address the big questions 

about H. naledi, but 

many of those questions still 

don’t have answers. 

Early in the morning session, 

team members Lauren 

Schroeder of the University 

of Buffalo, Lucas 

Delezene of the University 

of Arkansas, and Matthew 

Skinner of the University 

of Kent described the teeth 

and skulls of the H. naledi 

material. The overall pattern 

of these specimens is 

unique, with a confusing 

mix of seemingly primitive 

and derived traits. The species 

has several anatomical 

details also known in early 

species of our genus, such 

as Homo habilis and early 

members of Homo erectus. 

But it has a much smaller 

brain size than is typical 

of these species. In this 

and several aspects of its 

teeth, H. naledi resembles species that 

branched from our family tree much 

earlier in time, such as 3.2-million-yearold 

Australopithecus afarensis, the species 

of the famous “Lucy” fossil skeleton. 

In evolutionary biology, such a mixture 

of features is known as an anatomical 

mosaic. Paleoanthropologists have 

learned over the past century that 

human evolution was not a gradual 

progression from a very apelike ancestor 

to modern humans. Our small 

canine teeth and more upright posture 

evolved very early in our lineage, our 

pattern of bipedal walking next. At the 

midpoint of our evolutionary tree, ancestors 

and relatives went on a spree 

of evolving larger molar and premolar 

teeth—a trend that turned around 

when the first members of our genus, 

Homo, started hunting and making 

stone tools. Only then did they develop 

the kind of social sharing that led to 

language, which today characterizes 

people around the world. The brain 

evolved late, the legs early, and every 

species in our ancestry has its own mosaic 

of features from this legacy. 

H. naledi’s mosaic seems to conflict 

with this storyline. Nowhere is that 

more evident than at its hand, arm, and 

Representatives of Homo naledi stood between 140 and 160 

centimeters tall, but had a brain that was quite small for 

this size. Also, their teeth more closely resemble those of 

earlier hominin species. (Image courtesy of John Hawks.) 




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Dragon’s Back 

Dinaledi Chamber 

The fossils of Homo naledi were found in a cave called the Dinaledi Chamber, about 1,450 

meters below the surface. The chamber is accessed only through a series of steep, twisting, 

and narrow tunnels. The Superman's Crawl and the Dragon's Back are each less than 25 centimeters 

in diameter. (Illustration adapted from P. H. G. M. Dirks et al, eLife 2015, 4:e09561.) 

shoulder. Tracy Kivell of the University 

of Kent reported on the combination of 

a wrist and fingertips more humanlike 

than those of H. habilis, combined with 

very curved fingers, comparable to 

those of both the very earliest hominins 

and to living apes. Elen Feuerriegel of 

Australia National University showed 

a shoulder canted upward on the trunk 

where it would suit a climbing species, 

and an upper arm twisted in a way unlike 

other human relatives. Both match 

well to the thorax anatomy considered 

by Scott Williams of New York University, 

with a narrowed upper rib cage. H. 

naledi appears to have been a climber 

and a possible toolmaker, although we 

have not yet found any stone artifacts 

in the Dinaledi Chamber. 

The legs of H. naledi were long and 

comparatively slender, with some evidence 

for an elongation of the lower 

leg, according to Damiano Marchi of 

the University of Pisa and Christopher 

Walker of Duke University. However, 

Caroline VanSickle of the University of 

Wisconsin–Madison reported that the 

hips substantially share an anatomical 

pattern with the much-shorter-statured 

Lucy skeleton. Zach Throckmorton 

of Lincoln Memorial University took 

on the task of building this mixture of 

features into an overall picture of H. 

naledi’s gait, noting the evidence for a 

more humanlike foot. 

At the conclusion of the symposium, 

two talks integrated a broader picture 

of the biology by examining issues of 

body size and development. Heather 

Garvin of Mercyhurst University in 

Pennsylvania reported that adult individuals 

of H. naledi weighed between 

40 and 55 kilograms, and were between 

140 and 160 centimeters in stature, 

with males and females differing only 

slightly in size. She emphasized that 

H. naledi had a very small brain for this 

size. Debra Bolter of Modesto Junior 

College in California showed analysis 

of a range of individuals of different 

ages, represented by dental remains in 

the fossil deposit, from infants through 

very old adults. This sample is exceptional 

in our evolutionary record for 

preserving the anatomy of all life stages 

from one population. Further research 

on the growth and development of 

H. naledi may help us to understand 

how humans have come to have such 

uniquely long childhood development 

in comparison with other primates. 

The overall picture given by the results 

presented at the April symposium 

is that H. naledi walked more or 

less like humans do, seems to have 

had hands well made for handling and 

manipulating objects, and had teeth 

that indicate a high-quality diet—all 

things that link the species to our genus. 

Yet, it had a trunk, hips, shoulders, 

and fingers that contrast with 

that picture, and it had a brain similar 

in size to those of some of the earliest 

branches of the hominin lineage. 

In many ways H. naledi was adapted 

like a human, without anything like a 

human brain. 

In many ways 

Homo naledi was 

adapted like a 

human, without 

anything like a 

human brain. 

Further context for H. naledi’s place 

in the human lineage may come from 

the site of its discovery. Marina Elliott, 

a postdoctoral scholar at the University 

of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, 

reported on continuing work 

aimed at understanding the context of 

the fossils. She is now leading excavations 

at Rising Star, where priority has 

shifted from the Dinaledi Chamber to 

other parts of the cave, as we broaden 

our understanding of how sediments 

formed throughout the cave. Most other 

fossil sites in South Africa include 

Superman’s 

Crawl 

cave 

entrance 

1,450 meters 

10 meters 

50 feet 

the bones of many animals, with hominins 

being among the rarest. Strikingly, 

the Dinaledi Chamber contains no 

other medium or large animals other 

than hominins. This situation makes 

it a treasure for understanding their 

anatomy, but it creates challenges in 

interpreting the context and age of the 

assemblage. The team has published 

data showing that the bones bear no 

trace of carnivore activity, and that 

the sediments in the Dinaledi Chamber 

represent an isolated depositional 

environment, different from nearby 

chambers, which were not carried into 

the chamber by water action. Our best 

hypothesis is that H. naledi were using 

the chamber to deposit their dead, 

but as Elliott noted, we are developing 

more data to test this hypothesis. 

We planned a half-hour questionand-answer 

session at the end of the 

symposium session, facilitated by team 

members Steven E. Churchill of Duke 

University and Darryl J. de Ruiter of 

Texas A&M University. It was one of 

the most interesting periods of open 

discussion I’ve seen at a professional 

conference. People offered a broad 

range of perspectives about the H. naledi 

fossils, the site, and our open-access 

philosophy regarding the data. But during 

the discussion, one question was 

posed above all others: How will we be 

able to figure out the age of the fossils? 

The H. naledi analysis was unique 

in recent paleoanthropology for proceeding 

on the basis of anatomy alone, 

without knowing the age of the fossil 

deposit. This approach was taken partly 

out of necessity, because of the lack 


2016 July–August 199 



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The laid-out fossils of Homo naledi (above right) demonstrate the 

wealth of specimens found in the chamber. The fossils have been 

used to create simulations of the species’ full skeletal structure (above 

left). H. naledi’s trunk, hips, shoulders, and brain point to earlier hominin 

lineages, whereas its legs and hands look more like those of modern 

humans. (Images courtesy of John Hawks.) 

of many of the usual hints regarding 

geological age. But also, we recognized 

that the placement of a species into the 

family tree of organisms, or its phylogenetic 

position, is one that depends 

on the pattern of branching in the tree 

and not the age of the branches. H. naledi’s 

anatomical mosaic makes the age 

determination particularly difficult— 

did it acquire derived traits early or 

preserve primitive traits late? 

Still, the question of its age is a fascinating 

one that will test hypotheses 

about the environmental setting of 

H. naledi and answer the question of 

whether it coexisted with any other 

hominin species. We were able to report 

that we are working on determining 

the geological age of the fossil 

deposit, applying techniques that 

can be used to date the site’s flowstones 

(sheetlike formations of calcite that 

grow where water flows down walls 

or floors in caves). We are also using 

some destructive mechanisms to examine 

the bones and teeth themselves. 

Developing the chronology is a difficult 

undertaking, and we are committed 

to being cautious as we proceed. 

Another aspect of the project 

brought applause from the audience. 

High-resolution scans of many of the 

key H. naledi specimens have been 

posted to the MorphoSource website, 

where anyone can download them 

free of restrictions. Churchill reported 

that thousands of people around the 

world have downloaded scans for 3D 

printing, making their own copies of 

these fossils. At a lecture following the 

symposium, Berger announced that 

surface scan data from Australopithecus 

sediba, another South African fossil discovery, 

would immediately be available 

on MorphoSource as well. These 

technological developments could be 

quite revolutionary for anthropology. 

Moving forward, our team, led by 

Elliott on site, is excavating a second 

fossil locality within the cave, hoping 

to add more information about 

the overall setting of these hominins. 

Meanwhile, more investigators have 

visited the fossil collection to examine 

other aspects of the biology of H. naledi. 

We expect most of the work described 

in the symposium to be published over 

the next year. —John Hawks 

John Hawks is the Vilas-Borghesi Distinguished 

Achievement Professor of Anthropology at the 

University of Wisconsin–Madison. He blogs about 

paleoanthropology at http://johnhawks.net/. 




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First Person: Michael Spencer 

Batteries have their limitations. Even ubiquitous lithium batteries don’t scale well to small 

sizes, and they perform poorly in harsh conditions. Michael Spencer (right), an electrical 

engineer and computer scientist at Cornell University and a Sigma Xi Distinguished 

Lecturer, works on power generation with relatively low-energy radioactive sources. 

Spencer explained what these so-called betavoltaic devices are, and why they are now 

gaining popularity, to managing editor Fenella Saunders. (Spencer also works with twodimensional 

materials, such as graphene, that are one molecule thick; his comments about 

how those materials are, and are not, living up to their promised usefulness in electronics 

are included in the video of this interview: http://bit.ly/1ObOKgi.) 

______________ 

What is a betavoltaic device? 

Everybody knows what photovoltaics 

are; they produce a voltage by absorbing 

photons. Betavoltaics are a direct 

analogy to that, but instead of photons, 

they absorb high-energy electrons that 

are the product of radioisotope decay. 

If the radioisotope produces only electrons, 

it’s called a beta emitter. 

What materials release these highenergy 

electrons? 

The most popular source that we use 

is tritium, an isotope of hydrogen. The 

tritium is in the gas phase, but to make 

a device out of it we diffuse the tritium 

into titanium, where it bonds with the 

matrix and forms a metal hydride. 

This metal matrix is the source of the 

high-energy beta electrons. You place 

that right against your detector. 

How easily can these high-energy 

particles be shielded? 

Beta electrons are stopped very easily. 

For example, they’d be stopped by 

just a layer of dead skin; they don’t 

penetrate very far. 

But there are safety limitations 

imposed by the regulatory agencies 

about how much radioisotope one is 

allowed to use in these devices, so 

you get certain power limitations. 

Are there any devices that already 

use these isotopes? 

Most people don’t realize that they’ve 

been living with beta emitters in their 

homes and offices. Smoke detectors 

use a beta emitter called americium, 

whose high-energy electrons are used 

to detect whether or not you have a 

fire. Other produced radioisotope 

devices are used in gun sights, and 

in signs for environments that cannot 

tolerate open flame or spark. The 

high-energy electrons hit a phosphor, 

which then glows. 

What is the history of betavoltaic 

use in medical devices? 

In the 1980s, people made betavoltaics 

out of promethium, another beta emitter, 

and these batteries were used to 

power pacemakers in patients. These 

pacemakers were actually implanted 

but had very limited distribution; 

there were about 400 or 500 of them. 

Promethium is a very high-energy beta 

producer, and when the electrons decelerate 

they produce x-rays that have 

to be shielded, which made the device 

more bulky. 

How are tritium-based medical devices 

different from these older ones? 

The energy of the electrons they emit is 

much, much lower, and they don’t produce 

any radiation, so the shielding requirements 

are almost nonexistent. Also 

the size of the pacemaker has shrunk 

and the amount of power it requires is 

now much less than it used to be. It’s a 

pretty good match to what a betavoltaic 

cell could produce. The lifetime of these 

betavoltaic cells is related to the half-life 

of the isotope, which is 12.5 years. (That 

is the period of time during which half 

of the radioisotope’s nuclear reactions, 

of hydrogen going to helium, have 

taken place.) Any kind of implantable 

device—such as one measuring pressure 

or perhaps temperature—could 

benefit, particularly when you need a 

very small form factor and power requirements 

are modest. 

What is making betavoltaic devices 

attractive now? 

What’s happening is that things are 

coming together. The electronics industry 

now knows how to make exquisitely 

low-power electronics. In addition, 

as in the case of the pacemaker, 

the footprint of devices has shrunk. 

Now it’s time for a reexamination of 

this technology, because the application 

space is coming to meet it. It has a 

small power output but an extremely 

high energy density. 

How do these betavoltaic devices 

compare with traditional power 

sources such as batteries? 

With normal batteries, like lithium 

ones, there are certain limits. As you 

make them smaller and smaller, it 

becomes more and more difficult to 

make them perform as well. On the 

other hand, a betavoltaic device naturally 

scales to the smaller dimensions. 

Lithium batteries are not very 

good when the temperature changes, 

something betavoltaics are in fact 

very resistant to. 

The other thing that’s interesting to 

me is that we’re exploding into this 

idea of the Internet of things, but everybody 

is asking about the power 

sources. You can have a lithium battery, 

but it does not have a very long life, it’s 

pretty big, and it doesn’t work too well 

in relatively modest extreme environments. 

You can have a miniature solar 

cell, or a piezoelectric scavenger that 

will convert motion into energy, but if 

the Sun’s not shining and you’re not 

moving around, they don’t work. 

My vision would be that you’d 

have a trilogy of sources, with the betavoltaic 

source being the one of last 

resort that would keep the computer 

processor alive. Then you would use 

the sources when they came online, 

when somebody turned the light on 

in the room, or you started moving 

and something started vibrating and 

you were able to get power that way. 





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pillar device 

comb device 

In your devices, the surface of the 

material is covered with tiny pillars 

(left). What advantage does that 

structuring give the betavoltaic? 

Unlike solar cells, your energy source 

is right next to you, this titanium tritide. 

To increase the power for these 

betavoltaic devices, you create a larger 

surface area. Etching the surface puts 

more fuel on a given area of a device 

by a factor of a hundred, and in principle 

could increase the power by two 

orders of magnitude. 

The more surface area available on a betavoltaic device, the larger the power output it can 

produce from receiving high-energy electrons emitted during radioisotope decay. Patterning 

the detector materials with microscopic pillars or combs is one approach to increasing 

the overall surface area. (Images courtesy of Michael Spencer.) 

You start thinking of micropower as a 

microgrid with different sources being 

able to do the things that they do best. 

Can betavoltaics devices also be 

used as batteries? 

A betavoltaic is a power generator, not 

a storage device. But the power is always 

coming out, so you could capture 

it and store it in a capacitor or a thinfilm 

battery. Then you could still have 

that power for another time. 

Say you have an application where 

you wanted to monitor the temperature 

of an agricultural field over a 

long period of time. You’d put a lot 

of sensors down and have them take 

the temperature measurements. Making 

a record of that data doesn’t take 

much energy in today’s world; you 

can do that with a betavoltaic. But the 

readout, if you’re doing it with wi-fi, 

does take up a lot of energy. If you 

only wanted to read it out once every 

two weeks, you could probably store 

enough energy from the betavoltaic so 

that you could read out in a couple of 

minutes all of the data that you stored 

in two weeks of work. That’s a good 

application, because in this long-term 

monitoring, you’re looking for trends 

and not for actual data instantly. 

What are some additional potential 

applications for these betavoltaics? 

Another interesting application is antitampering. 

Suppose you had a box of 

electronics that you didn't want people 

to look at. You need something that 

doesn’t have to have a lot of power but 

just has to be on all the time to detect 

a breakage when somebody opens it 

and then trigger an alarm. For that, a 

betavoltaic device is interesting. 

If you wanted to store a cryptographic 

key electronically, again you 

want something that lives a long time 

with almost no power output. That’s 

a good application for a betavoltaic 

device as well. 

When could these devices be commercially 

mass-produced? 

I think you can get a working prototype 

for the medical area within one or 

two years and a production prototype 

within five years. 




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Briefings 

Bobjgalindo/Wikimedia Commons 

In this roundup, digital features 

editor Katie L. Burke summarizes 

notable recent developments in scientific 

research, selected from reports 

compiled in the free electronic newsletter 

Sigma Xi SmartBrief. Online: https:// ____ 

www.smartbrief.com/sigmaxi/index.jsp 

New Primate Fossils in Asia 

The unearthing in China of 10 primate 

fossils that date to a period of climatic 

cooling is helping paleontologists understand 

why humans arose in Africa 

rather than in Asia, where primates 

originated. At the end of the Eocene 

epoch, 34 million years ago, the world 

turned colder and drier, and many 

primate species became extinct or migrated 

southward. Studies of fossils dating 

to this period have established that 

anthropoids—the primate lineage that 

includes monkeys, apes, and hominids— 

rose to dominance in Africa after this 

climate shift. However, there has been 

a knowledge gap about how primates 

fared in Asia. Although anthropoids 

were diverse in Asia in the Eocene, they 

declined over the period of climatic 

change that marked its end. These new 

primate fossils indicate that a lemur-like 

lineage then became dominant in Asia. 

Ni, X., Q. Li, L. Li, and K. C. Beard. Oligocene 

primates from China reveal divergence 

between African and Asian primate evolution. 

Science 352:673–677 (May 6) 

Skin Cells Turned into Sperm 

Researchers in Spain have induced human 

skin cells to become immature 

sperm in vitro, a technique that eventually 

could lead to new fertility treatments. 

To achieve the reprogramming, 

the team introduced two cell types in 

a cocktail of growth factors known to 

stimulate the expression of six genes 

related to germline differentiation. The 

cells, taken from men, then began expressing 

markers for these germline cells, 

and some divided by meiosis, resulting 

in immature sperm. These sperm were 

not viable, however—they would need 

to develop in vivo to become capable of 

fertilizing an egg. This study is an early 

step in developing a stem cell–based 

fertility treatment. Scientists in China 

recently were able to successfully birth 

mice from sperm reprogrammed from 

stem cells. But to do so in humans will 

require an extended process of scrutiny. 

Medrano, J. V., et al. Human somatic cells subjected 

to genetic induction with six germ line– 

related factors display meiotic germ cell–like 

features. Scientific Reports 6: 24956 (April 26) 

Computer Model of Planet Nine 

In January, research on the movement 

of objects in the Kuiper Belt at the Solar 

System’s edge pointed to the existence 

of a ninth large planet beyond Neptune, 

and a new study has modeled the potential 

size, temperature, and brightness of 

the putative “Planet Nine.” Astronomers 

at the University of Bern in Switzerland 

tried out size estimates and possible 

orbits to see what best fit current data. 

They concluded that Planet Nine could 

have a mass 10 times greater than Earth’s 

and that its effective temperature should 

be about 47 kelvins. The researchers say 

that infrared telescopes might increase 

the low chances of detecting the planet, 

because their temperature estimate suggests 

that it does not solely rely on the 

Sun for warmth, but also derives heat 

from its core. Nevertheless, astronomer 

Mike Brown, who originally proposed the 

planet, is confident he will observe it and 

is applying for time with the Subaru telescope 

to do so. Planet Nine will not be an 

official planet until it is directly observed. 

Linder, E. F., and C. Mordasini. Evolution and 

magnitudes of candidate Planet Nine. Astronomy 

and Astrophysics 589:A134 (April 25) 

Water in New Quantum State 

In a study that defies classical physics, 

water was observed in a quantum tunneling 

state unlike a liquid, solid, or gas, 

demonstrating how the substance can 

perform in ultraconfinement in rocks, 

soil, or cell walls. After confining water 

in nanoscale tubes of the mineral beryl, 

physicists at Oak Ridge National Laboratory 

observed the molecules in quantum 

motion: The oxygen and hydrogen atoms 

were delocalized, meaning they were simultaneously 

in six positions in the tubes. 

The observation of tunneling of water is 

Dr. Naoji Yubuki 

unprecedented and will kindle discussions 

about its performance in confined geological, 

biological, or synthetic settings. 

Kolesnikov, A. I., et al. Quantum tunneling 

of water in beryl: A new state of the 

water molecule. Physical Review Letters 

116:167802 (April 22) 

Jeff Scovil/ORNL 

Eukaryote Without Mitochondria 

A key difference between bacteria and 

archaea (also called prokaryotes) and 

all other organisms (called eukaryotes) 

is the presence in the latter of powerhouse 

organelles, or mitochondria. But 

a new study describes such cells without 

this defining trait, thought to be essential 

to their function. While sequencing 

the genome of a gut parasite in the 

genus Monocercomonoides to look 

for mitochondrial markers, a research 

team at the University of British Columbia 

turned up none. Other eukaryotes 

need mitochondria to convert food to 

energy and also to form vital iron-sulfur 

proteins. Most energy generation uses 

oxygen, but this anaerobic organism 

appears to produce ATP (a molecule for 

energy 

storage) in 

the cytoplasm 

in 

the same 

way that 

several 

related 

species and 

some prokaryotes 

do. The team thinks that an ancestor of 

the parasite procured systems to form 

the proteins through horizontal gene 

transfer, a direct deposit of genes from 

one organism to another. Some closely 

related species have few mitochondria, 

suggesting that this organism lost the 

organelle through evolution rather than 

being ancestral to all eukaryotes. 

Karnkowska, A., et al. A eukaryote without 

a mitochondrial organelle. Current Biology 

doi:10.1016/j.cub.2016.03.053 (May 12) 





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A view of the simulation minus 

the flame makes it easier to 

see that the flame’s location 

appears to be linked to the 

consumption of the products 

of the preignition chemical 

reactions (yellow to red). 

A quarter-turn view shows 

how the turbulence in the 

oxygenated fuel jet (gray) 

affects the burning flame 

(blue). But the flame remains 

stable; it does not burn farther 

up or recede down the fuel jet. 

mass fraction of methoxymethyl-hydroperoxy 

0 0.00015 

mass fraction of hydroxyl 

0 0.007 




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Sightings 

A Computed Flame 

To understand how fuel burns in a diesel engine takes chemistry 

knowledge and supercomputing muscle. 

Modern diesel engines are still pretty 

dirty, even if they’re not belching out 

thick smoke. Cleaning them up—and 

making them even more efficient— 

presents a real challenge because understanding 

how they burn fuel is hard: Diesel engines operate 

at high pressures and temperatures that are too 

harsh and burn fuel too fast for the accurate measurements 

needed to inform better engine designs. 

Enter computational fluid dynamics, through 

which scientists can take a virtual snapshot of fuel 

burning at high pressures and temperatures (see 

opposite page) and even make an animation (view 

online at www.americanscientist.org). 

_________________ 

To make such a model, the first step is to 

pick the fuel. Researchers at Sandia National 

Laboratory chose dimethyl ether (DME) over 

diesel. “The chemistry of DME is better known 

and easier to model than some of the large 

hydrocarbon fuels,” says Jacqueline Chen, who 

ran the simulation along with Yuki Minamoto 

of the Tokyo Institute of Technology. Knowing 

the chemistry is a prerequisite, because as large 

hydrocarbons burn, they break up into smaller 

ones, which then also must be modeled. Diesel’s 

composition is variable; it contains a mixture of 

large hydrocarbons with 8 to 24 carbon atoms per 

molecule. With only 2 carbon atoms per molecule, 

DME (CH 3 OCH 3 ) has fewer breakups. 

Still, burning DME generates lots of different 

combustion products, or species, and modeling 

how they break up and where they virtually go requires 

a supercomputer. Using Oak Ridge National 

Laboratory’s Titan—currently the second-fastest 

supercomputer in the world and capable of around 

20 million billion calculations per second—the researchers 

employed a previously developed simulation 

code to compute the mass, mass fraction, three 

components of momenta, and total energy of 30 

of DME’s species at each of the billion points in a 

three-dimensional grid (3024 x 897 x 384). 

Of those 30 species, this visualization includes 

just two. The first of these two occurs in 

preignition reactions. DME mixed with air 

(colored gray, injected turbulently upward as if 

into an engine’s cylinder) can become a radical 

(CH 3 OCH 2 ) and combine with oxygen (O 2 ) to form 

methoxymethyl-hydroperoxy (CH 3 OCH 2 O 2 ). So 

tracing this species (colored yellow to red) shows 

the rate of low-temperature chemical reactions, 

which are key to the eventual flame ignition. Tracing 

the products of high-temperature combustion— 

including the hydroxyl radical (OH) (colored blue to 

green)—shows the location of the flame. 

“The goal of this simulation is to understand how 

a flame stabilizes above a burner” at conditions 

relevant to understanding diesel engines, says Chen, 

“and what we’re seeing is that the flame seems to 

be stabilizing on the surfaces of these yellowishcolored 

species, indicating that low-temperature 

reactions help stabilize the flame against the 

disrupting effects of high-velocity turbulence.” 

The animation, of which this picture is a single 

frame, shows this effect more clearly because the 

researchers carefully chose to simulate conditions— 

including turbulence intensity, fuel temperatures 

and pressures—in order to maximize “turbulenceflame 

interaction while maintaining a feasible computational 

cost,” Chen and Minamoto write in the 

July issue of Combustion and Flame. 

Running this one simulation generated hundreds 

of terabytes of data, but only about a quarter of that 

was needed to visualize it, says Hongfeng Yu of the 

University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Still, downloading 

it all took hours. “I started transferring the data 

and then I went home,” he says. Once the data 

were downloaded, though, Yu rendered this image 

in about a second on his graphics workstation: a 

consumer-grade desktop computer. He then made 

about 60 more images to produce the animation. 

“So,” Yu says, “rendering time is marginal compared 

with simulation time and data-transferring time.” 

For that reason, Yu and Chen have been working 

together to integrate data visualization with simulation, 

taking advantage of the supercomputer’s processing 

power to visualize and analyze data as soon 

as they are generated rather than store them for 

future transfer and analysis. “You just can’t store all 

that data,” says Chen, which will become ever more 

the case as researchers move on to modeling more 

complex problems for longer time frames that require 

even faster supercomputers. —Robert Frederick 





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Arts Lab 

The Art and Science of 

Solar Eclipses 

After 150 years of expeditions, we have finally arrived at a definitive 

understanding of the corona revealed by solar eclipses. 

Richard Woo 

Sixteenth-century France was a 

society in which religious teachings 

coexisted uneasily with superstition. 

Unusual events in the 

natural world were probed for hidden 

meanings; an occurrence as remarkable 

as a total eclipse of the Sun must, it was 

thought, be an omen of some sort. It 

was in this context that Antoine Caron, 

a painter in the court of Catherine de 

Medici, depicted the scene of a solar 

eclipse shown on the facing page. The 

painting now hangs in the J. Paul Getty 

Museum in Los Angeles under the title 

Dionysius the Areopagite Converting the 

Pagan Philosophers. By contrast with 

Caron’s theological rendering, more 

recent attempts to understand solar 

eclipses have focused on the physical 

forces that cause them and the remarkable 

visual effects they produce. 

Modern research into solar eclipses 

can be said to have begun around 1860, 

with a consensus among researchers 

that the appearance of a luminous 

area encircling the darkened body of 

the Sun—the corona—was in fact the 

Sun’s atmosphere. Normally invisible to 

earthbound observers, this atmosphere 

could be seen during solar eclipses only 

because the Moon was then blocking the 

much brighter, direct light of the Sun. 

The goal of early investigations was to 

Richard Woo is a senior research scientist 

emeritus at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory 

of the California Institute of Technology 

in Pasadena, where for the past 52 years his 

research has focused on the structure and 

dynamics of solar and planetary atmospheres 

and the use of spacecraft radio signals to probe 

them. Email: _______________ 

richard.woo@jpl.nasa.gov 

determine how the brightness of the 

white light revealed during solar eclipses 

was distributed in space. Although 

the first investigations were carried out 

mainly by means of visual observations 

and photography, and later by quantitative 

measurements, ultimately it was a 

series of little-known paintings by the 

artist Howard Russell Butler (1856–1934) 

that provided the missing piece of the 

puzzle needed to fulfill this goal. 

Visual Perception Captured by Art 

When it comes to the scholarly investigation 

of visual phenomena, the adage 

“seeing is believing” turns out to be 

something of a trap. The image produced 

in the human brain by what we 

“see” can differ considerably from the 

image presented in a photograph, and 

nowhere is this truer than in efforts to 

capture accurately the visual perception 

of the Sun’s corona. Butler’s paintings 

captured what the eye saw, more 

credibly than any other depictions either 

before or since, thanks to his unusual 

talents. His extraordinary skill 

of being able to paint from memory 

what he had glimpsed for only a brief 

time—such as landscapes during sunrise 

and sunset—served him well in 

painting solar eclipses, which likewise 

last only a couple of minutes. He also 

painted portraits, his best-known subject 

being the eminent philanthropist 

and industrialist Andrew Carnegie. 

In this genre, he developed another 

skill that served him well: Wishing to 

shorten the sitting time of his subjects, 

he developed a system of shorthand 

sketching to record particular colors, 

shades, and features for later reference. 

Butler’s most important qualification, 

however, was that he had studied 

physics and electrical engineering at the 

College of New Jersey (now Princeton 

University), receiving his science degree 

in 1876. This academic background put 

him in good stead when he was invited 

to join the U.S. Naval Observatory’s 

eclipse expedition in 1918. Although he 

had never yet seen an eclipse, he drew 

up meticulous scientific plans and executed 

them with the same artistic ability 

he used to paint other transient phenomena. 

Astronomers who saw both 

the eclipse and Butler’s painting looked 

upon the latter as a marvel of perfection, 

true to both form and color, a work of art 

that had the added advantage of being 

both accurate and realistic. 

A comparison of Butler’s painting 

with the two photographs that appear 

beside it at the top of pages 210–211 

raises a number of questions. Why is 

the distribution of brightness in the photographs 

different from that portrayed 

by Butler? Why are the streamers of the 

paintings absent from the middle photograph 

displaying the globular corona? 

Between painting and photograph, 

which—if either—representation is true? 

Imaging and Reality 

To answer these questions, there must be 

a standard set of criteria that can be applied 

in each case, along with the premise 

that images are merely a display of 

quantitative measurements, or, in other 

words, numerical values of brightness 

distributed in space. Because quantitative 

measurements represent the true brightness, 

they are essential for understanding 

and validating images for scientific 




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use. For instance, a useful quantitative 

way of representing how white light is 

distributed throughout an image is with 

isophotes, or contours along which brightness 

is constant, like the lines of constant 

elevation on a topographic map. An example 

appears on the lower left of page 

210 in the image of the globular corona of 

the 2006 solar eclipse and its corresponding 

isophotes. (That recent solar eclipse is 

chosen because by then isophotes were 

being more accurately measured than 

they had been in earlier eclipses.) 

When the isophotes are superposed 

on the globular corona, the isophote 

closest to the boundary matches the 

shape of the corona. This is to be expected, 

because the perceived shape of 

the corona is determined by the threshold 

sensitivity of brightness, and the 

isophote closest to the shape identifies 

its level. When less light is captured in 

an image made with a shorter exposure 

time, the imaged corona shrinks, 

but its shape continues to match the 

relevant isophotes at lower altitude. 

Representing brightness in terms of 

isophotes reveals another key quantitative 

property of the white-light corona 

that is not evident from the image itself. 

Its brightness falls steeply with radial 

distance from the disk of the Sun. In just 

one solar radius from the Sun’s limb, 

brightness drops by more than a factor 

of 100. With the limited dynamic range 

of photographic imaging, the brightness 

of the inner corona of an image showing 

the extended corona is saturated. Still, 

the coincidence between the shape of 

the outer corona (where it is not saturated) 

and isophotes at all altitudes validates 

the globular corona as representing 

the true distribution of white-light 

brightness—that is, the reality. 

Illusion in Perception 

One may wonder, then, why isophotes 

cannot be discerned in the shape of the 

corona painted by Butler. This apparent 

contradiction arises from the physical 

constraints underlying our sense of 

sight. The human eye and brain have 

an enormous dynamic range, which allows 

us to see on a sunny day and also 

in moonlight, but they can achieve this 

range only by changing their overall 

sensitivity, using a phenomenon known 

as brightness adaptation. Without being 

consciously aware of this phenomenon, 

we nevertheless take it into account 

when we walk from a well-lit lobby into 

a dark movie theater and wait for our 

eyes to adjust to the abrupt darkness. 

The study of solar eclipses—beautiful, baffling, and rare occurrences in nature—has a long 

history, with the frames of reference varying from the mystic to the religious to the scientific. 

Interestingly, this painting by 16th-century artist Antoine Caron was labeled Astronomers 

Studying an Eclipse when first acquired by the Courtauld Institute of Art in London; it now 

hangs in the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles under what is thought to be its original 

title, Dionysius the Aeropagite Converting the Pagan Philosophers. 

Brightness adaptation comes at a 

cost. We can discriminate changes in 

daylight and among shades of darkness 

when we view them separately, 

but when they appear next to each other, 

our ability to discriminate changes 

simultaneously is much smaller than 

the adaptation range. In everyday life 

this limitation isn’t a problem; it is extremely 

rare for the eye and brain to 

encounter an object such as the corona 

with more than two orders of magnitude 

of simultaneous dynamic range of 

brightness. Confronted by such an extraordinary 

sight, the priority of the eye 

and brain is simply to identify objects 

in the visual field: No wonder it copes 

with this challenge by forming an illusion. 

The question then becomes, What 

is the nature of the illusion? 

Artifacts of Processed Images 

An answer to this question emerged 

in the 1960s, when the High Altitude 

Observatory in Boulder, Colorado, developed 

a specialized camera that apparently 

came close to functioning like 

the human visual system. The Newkirk 

camera is equipped with radially graded 

filters to compensate for the steep radial 

falloff in brightness. As in Butler’s 

paintings, the shape of the corona in 





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Howard Russell Butler’s painting of the 1932 eclipse (left) was acclaimed 

for its accuracy, and yet it bears little resemblance to the 

photograph of the same event taken by astronomer G. Harper Hall 

(center). More recently the Newkirk camera, equipped with radially 

graded filters, has fortuitously managed to mimic the workings of the 

eye and brain in human vision to capture the illusory appearance of 

coronal streamers (right) portrayed in Butler’s painting. (Left to right: 

images courtesy of Princeton University, gift of David H. McAlpin; 

Royal Astronomical Society of Canada; High Altitude Observatory, 

University Corporation for Atmospheric Research.) 

the processed images produced by the 

Newkirk camera bears no resemblance 

to contours of the isophotes, and unless 

corrected for the filtering, do not represent 

the true brightness distribution of 

the corona. The apparent jagged shape 

of the corona is, therefore, an artifact. 

Moreover, the striking resemblance of 

E 

An unmarked photograph of the solar eclipse 

of March 29, 2006, shows that the white-light 

distribution of the corona is globular in shape 

and brightest at its inner edges (top). The gradations 

of brightness of the light can be delineated 

in terms of isophotes, superimposed on 

the photograph (bottom) like the contour lines 

on a topographic map. (Reprinted from R. 

Woo and H. Druckmüllerová, Astrophysical 

Journal 678:L149, with permission of AAS.) 

S 

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W 

coronal streamers in Butler’s painting of 

the 1932 eclipse to those in the Newkirkphotographed 

image of the 1994 eclipse 

tells us that streamers are an artifact of 

the processed image, as well as an illusion 

in visual perception. 

The insight provided by the Newkirk 

camera into how the naked eye sees the 

corona is invaluable. By showing how 

the streamers are formed, it reveals the 

workings of the optical illusion. This 

outcome is not too surprising, because 

the purpose of the Newkirk camera is 

to capture the large dynamic range of 

brightness of the corona in a single exposure 

by suppressing the brighter inner 

corona—a goal apparently similar 

to that of visual perception. 

Artifact But Not Illusion 

Coronal streamers are not the only artifact 

of the processed image. Another 

is the so-called coronal holes that often 

appear at the poles as dark regions at 

the base of the corona, extending and 

diverging with increasing height. Such 

coronal holes are conspicuously absent 

from the illusions captured in Butler’s 

paintings, as seen on these pages and 

also in other paintings shown in my 

2010 article in American Scientist. The 

Newkirk camera apparently suppresses 

the brightness of the inner corona to 

the point where it is not detected in the 

coronal holes, on account of inadequate 

brightness sensitivity of the image. 

When the brightness of the processed 

image is increased (as shown at right), 

the holes disappear and the processed 

image resembles Butler’s paintings. 

Although the sight of polar coronal 

holes is an artifact, it is not an optical illusion 

like the sight of coronal streamers. 

The holes do not appear in quantitative 

measurements, nor are they evident in 

paintings or in unprocessed images of 

An image of the white-light corona on January 

17, 1997, taken by the ground-based High 

Altitude Observatory Mauna Loa coronameter, 

reproduces the artifacts of diverging polar coronal 

holes and coronal streamers (top). When 

brightness and contrast are enhanced (bottom), 

the illusion of diverging polar coronal holes is 

gone. (Reprinted from R. Woo, Solar Physics 

231:71, with permission of Springer.) 




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On the Trail of the Solar Wind 

the globular corona. After decades of 

coronal imaging, it is surprising to learn 

that the diverging polar coronal holes 

commonly observed in most eclipse 

photos today do not in fact exist. Instead, 

they show up only in processed 

images—that is, those that have been 

processed to adjust the brightness—or 

else as a consequence of the selected radially 

graded filter. Thus, they are an 

artifact in two ways, being both humanproduced 

and human-selected. 

In the words of perceptual psychologist 

Claus-Christian Carbon, “It may 

be fun to perceive illusions, but the understanding 

of how they work is even 

more stimulating and sustainable.... Illusions 

in a scientific context are not 

mainly created to reveal the failures of 

our perception or the dysfunctions of 

our apparatus, but instead to point to 

the specific power of human perception.” 

Butler’s paintings show not only 

that human perception determines that 

the corona is brightest at the base of the 

corona but also that the brightness is 

unbroken all the way around the Sun. 

The ability to recognize this and to exclude 

coronal holes from its illusion attests 

to the power of human perception. 

The expanding atmosphere of the Sun, known as the solar wind, consists 

of charged particles that stream from the Sun at high speed. The origin 

and evolution of the solar wind were deduced from radio occultation 

measurements made by the Ulysses space mission, the first spacecraft to use 

radio measurements to define the spatial distribution of electron density, and 

hence brightness, in the tenuous polar regions of the corona. Although the 

radio results from the Ulysses mission were robust and unambiguous, they 

were surprisingly at odds with prevailing views of the solar wind, as discussed 

in my 2002 article with Shadia Habbal in American Scientist. 

When I participated in my first solar eclipse expedition, in India in 1995, 

what surprised me most was that pictures taken by a personal camera did not 

look at all like those in textbooks. Two decades later, I was equally surprised 

to find that clarifying the relations among visual perception, photographic 

imaging, and physical measurements led to the exposure of a long-hidden 

error in the scientific view of the solar wind that was current at the time. 

The error was based on the supposed observation of diverging polar coronal 

holes—an observation that we now know to be a human-generated artifact. 

Should you have the good fortune to witness the upcoming 2017 total 

solar eclipse, the first of this century to be visible in the United States, take 

a few quick pictures with your personal camera or smartphone. Your photos 

will capture a globular corona just like those seen a century ago. You will 

not see the glamor of the coronal holes or streamers that appear in many 

astronomical photos, but do not be disappointed—in terms of brightness 

distribution, truth is on your side. Spend the rest of your time searching for 

coronal holes in the inner corona. You will not find any, and now you will 

understand why. Turn your attention to the outer corona and try to make 

out the stretched streamers, while heeding the advice of Edward Krupp, 

director of the Griffith Observatory: “Despite the corona’s fraudulent behavior, 

the trick the eye plays with the brain remains a delight.” 

Bibliography 

Butler, H. R. 1926. Painting eclipses and lunar 

landscapes. Journal of the American Museum 

of Natural History XXVI:356–362. 

Carbon, C.-C. 2014. Understanding human 

perception by human-made illusions. Frontiers 

in Human Neuroscience 8, article 566. 

Sinclair, R. M. 2012. Howard Russell Butler: 

Painter extraordinary of solar eclipses. Culture 

and Cosmos 16:345–355. 

Woo, R. 2011. Coronal streamers revealed during 

solar eclipses: Seeing is not believing, 

and pictures can lie. i-Perception 2:565–568. 

Woo, R. 2015. Perception of solar eclipses captured 

by art explains how imaging misrepresented 

the source of the solar wind. 

i-Perception 6:1–6. 


Michael Zeiler 2014 www.greatamericaneclipse.com 




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Perspective 

The Tales We All Must Tell 

Public confessions of misdeeds against nature can inspire environmental 

awareness, commitment, and action. 

Robert Louis Chianese 

As I crossed the channel 

from Ventura, California, to 

Channel Islands National 

Park on a misty morning 

a year ago, I recognized that our excursion 

boat captain had once been 

my fishing boat captain on the same 

waters. I approached him and asked 

whether he had given up fishing. He 

said he had, and explained why: 

I just couldn’t watch all that 

waste. Nice people out for a day 

of fishing kept bringing in more 

and more fish they didn’t need 

just to feel they had a good day. 

Some fishermen gave away extras 

to others so they could go on and 

hook and fight and reel in more 

without going over limits. 

I understand that, I said. I did that 

too, when we had a good run. I would 

keep the biggest ones and give smaller 

ones away. That was rather sneaky. 

The captain continued: 

I didn’t mind that so much, but 

when in certain seasons we came 

into a run of jumbo squid, the huge 

white Humboldts, then the waste 

was too much. Few people took 

them home, so when it was over, 

Robert Louis Chianese is professor emeritus of 

English at California State University, Northridge; 

a 1979 Mitchell Prize Laureate in Sustainability; 

and past president of the American Association 

for the Advancement of Science, Pacific Division 

(2012), the only humanities professor selected 

for the post in its 100-year history. He sponsors 

symposia at the annual AAAS-PD meetings on 

humanities-science connections. His forthcoming 

collection of original poetry, Science-Inspired 

Poems, includes science-inspired art from various 

artists. Email: ____________ 

rlchianese@gmail.com 

the crew and I were left with a boatload 

of them covering the whole 

deck, sometimes two deep, with 

not one person taking even one 

home. Every day this happened I 

tried to shut the fishing down, but 

the thrill was too great. The sport 

was lost in wasting these animals. 

I kept it up for a while, but then 

I saw we were taking too many of 

all fishes. Fewer and fewer were 

full-size, even though we stayed 

Much of the modern 

environmental 

movement may 

rest on the words of 

transformed offenders. 

within limits. I made sure of that. 

Still, I had had it, those boatloads 

of jumbo squid. I stopped fishing. 

What was most striking to me about 

the captain’s story was the way he decided 

to quit. Not because of a regulation. 

Not because of being lectured or 

shamed. He did it on his own, in a way 

that made perfect sense to me. Indeed, 

I had myself given up fishing for very 

similar reasons. 

Far more often, though, we remain 

stuck in our behaviors, often completely 

ignoring their consequences. Every 

day, we commit assaults against the 

environment, both large and small. I 

am not pointing fingers. I do it, too: I 

still eat meat, including fish; I bought 

a new hybrid but have an old truck 

for fun (a case of flash over efficiency); 

I walk for exercise, but could do errands 

that way too; and as a droughtconscious 

Californian I should empty 

every full drain bucket from our kitchen 

sink outside on our plants, but I 

don’t—too lazy for such water-saving 

efficiency each time, I guess. 

Collectively, these acts have profound 

consequences on a global scale. Scientists 

warn that we are already experiencing 

some of the effects of humaninduced 

global climate disturbance, such 

as melting glaciers, rising sea levels, 

and an increased frequency of extreme 

weather events. We are in our “sixth extinction” 

period on planet Earth, with 

the speed of extinctions estimated to be 

100 times faster than before modern humans 

entered the picture. And yet we 

don’t see a public alarmed and motivated 

to remedy the global catastrophe we 

are engineering. Do we need more statistics, 

more fact-based warnings, more 

climate science, more news coverage? 

I suggest we try a new tactic to inspire 

the public to take action: Make it personal. 

The boat captain’s brief recital of what 

happened to him is a personal confession. 

It moved me because of the teller’s 

transformation from gung-ho fisherman 

to sober environmentalist, all of it conveyed 

in his tone as much as through 

the story itself. He wasn’t preaching 

but telling a former customer what had 

changed him, and the brief rapport between 

us indicated we understood each 

other. That was a closeness I didn’t anticipate, 

and I should have volunteered my 

own story of becoming disturbed about 

wasting our precious ocean resources. 

Such stories have a way of drawing 

us in, tying us to the specifics of the character 

and the situation in a way that media 

coverage of abuses against nature often 

does not. Hearing stories of personal 

confessions of transgressions against 




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Bridgeman Images 

Public confessions of transgressions against nature may inspire others to reflect on their own contributions to 

environmental issues. The humanities can demonstrate how to make these confessions personal and motivational. 

Here, an 1866 illustration by Gustave Dore shows the Ancient Mariner in Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s 

“The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” telling a wedding guest his harrowing tale of killing an albatross. 

nature can prompt others to reevaluate 

their relationship to the natural world, 

perhaps reflect on mindless damage that 

they may have caused it, and, in some 

cases, seek ways to atone for the act. 

The Art and Power of Storytelling 

The poet and writer can teach us how to 

make stories of environmental transgression 

personal and persuasive. Poetry, 

literature, drama, and other disciplines 

within the humanities are built around 

stories that produce immediate emotional 

impacts. These art forms frame issues 

of life and death and everything in between 

in personal terms. They place specific 

characters at the center of terrifying 

human conflicts and allow us to watch 

them twist, turn, and suffer the pains 

of avoiding their own collision with 

the conflict. A crisis often crushes the 

characters but can break them open to 

self-acceptance and wisdom—for them 

and vicariously for us. 

There is perhaps no better model for 

confessing an environmental abuse than 

Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s 

“The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.” 

Although a 200-year-old 

poem may seem like an unlikely 

place to find inspiration 

for a modern environmental 

movement, Coleridge’s tale is 

an excellent example of how 

to make a moving confession 

of an environmental misdeed. 

This early romantic period 

poem from the famous 

volume Lyrical Ballads (1798) 

follows the life path of someone 

who violates the natural 

world. The mariner’s shipmates 

befriend an albatross, 

which they believe brings 

a wind that drives the ship 

out of the frigid Antarctic. 

The mariner shoots it with a 

crossbow, thoughtlessly. Then 

an ensuing intense heat and 

lack of rain afflict the crew, 

and they hang the albatross 

around the mariner’s neck, 

blaming his act for the stasis 

and high temperature. (To 

this day, an “albatross” remains 

a metaphor for a guilty 

transgression one cannot 

remove—a testament to the 

power this poem still carries 

centuries after it was written.) 

The whole crew drops 

dead, so that the mariner is 

“Alone on a wide wide sea!” 

At night the isolated mariner 

notices luminescent “watersnakes” 

flashing colors, and 

becomes entranced by their 

beauty and blesses them, 

again “unaware.” Whereupon 

the albatross falls from his 

neck into the sea and it rains 

buckets. We are only halfway 

through the poem, but we 

can look ahead to the conclusion 

and its succinct homiletic 

moral of radical biophilia that 

redeems the mariner: We need to love 

“all things both great and small” for our 

own health and survival. 

The mariner spends the rest of his 

life as an itinerant confessor and manic 

recruiter for his vision of nature. We 

hear his tale as he retells it to an anonymous 

guest on the way to a wedding. 

The guest ultimately does not attend 

the wedding; he leaves stunned, contemplating 

what he has just heard 

from the madman storyteller. Apparently 

he needs time to recover before 





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The Aldo Leopold Foundation, Oxford University Press 

Scientist and environmental writer Aldo Leopold vividly described his own unnecessary killing 

of wolves in his 1949 collection of essays, A Sand County Almanac. He used his confession 

to inspire others to recognize the value of each creature in an ecosystem. 

he resumes his participation in society 

and its cultural traditions, such as marriage. 

He may not go off on an expedition 

to save albatrosses, but he may 

ask himself if he loves all creatures 

great and small. Such is the effect of 

powerful stories of personal transgression 

and transformation. 

Many modern-day environmental 

writers have employed similar storytelling 

strategies to confess publicly 

their acts against the natural world. 

In the 1949 book A Sand County Almanac: 

And Sketches Here and There, which 

sold more than two million copies and 

helped establish the modern conservation 

movement, renowned ecologist 

Aldo Leopold described how he once 

“pumped lead” into a playful pack of 

wolves “with more excitement than accuracy,” 

and then came to a new appreciation 

of the importance of each interconnected 

creature in an ecosystem. 

In the 1991 book Second Nature, popular 

journalist Michael Pollan described 

how he became obsessed with eradicating 

a woodchuck from his garden, 

which, he confesses, “put me in touch 

with a few of our darker attitudes toward 

nature: the way her intransigence 

can make us crazy, and how willing we 

are to poison her in the single-minded 

pursuit of some short-term objective.” 

By telling their stories, environmental 

writers have inspired others to reflect 

on their own transgressions. Indeed, 

much of the modern environmental 

movement may rest on the words of 

transformed offenders such as these. 

The Blackfish Effect 

Documentaries are powerful modern 

platforms for storytelling. These films 

have helped inspire the public to push 

for environmental regulations, including 

better protection of animals such 

as elephants and great apes. In one 

present-day iteration of Coleridge’s 

mythic investigation of humanity’s 

relation to nature, the documentary 

Blackfish (2013) captures the shift of 

consciousness of many SeaWorld 

trainers about the cruelty of confining 

killer whales to tanks and the dangers 

these whales can pose to the staff. 

Much of the film centers on the killing 

of Orca trainer Dawn Brancheau in 

2010 by the whale Tilikum. SeaWorld 

announced the death as “an accident” 

resulting from Brancheau’s supposed 

mistake of allowing her ponytail to 

dangle in the water, which the whale 

used to drag her under during a performance. 

This account of the “accident” 

was exposed as a lie by trainer Linda 

Simons, who lost her job for going public 

with information about poor training 

and dangerous whales at SeaWorld. 

But it took several years and the personal 

confessions in Blackfish to set the 

record straight (the water park publicly 

contests some of the information in the 

movie, so controversy remains). Blackfish 

revealed the lingering self-imposed 

silence of the trainers, who felt loyalty 

to the whales and wanted to protect 

them. Many trainers did not at first acknowledge 

that simply by training and 

performing with the whales, they were 

committing their own transgressive 

acts. In the film, their realizations of 

culpability finally get released through 

open, tear-filled, seemingly real-time 

confessions. The trainers also express 

anger at members of management 

who lied for so long after almost all the 

trainers had come clean about the real 

condition of the whales born, kept, and 

trained in captivity. 

In a final turnabout that parallels the 

mariner’s story, SeaWorld will transform 

itself into a protector and conser- 




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vator of all marine life. It announced 

this year that it will phase out all orca 

shows over the next few years, and stop 

breeding the animals in captivity. In addition, 

along with the Humane Society 

of the United States, SeaWorld pledges 

to “actively partner in efforts against 

the commercial killing of whales, seals, 

and other marine mammals, as well 

as end shark finning.” It also commits 

itself “to protect coral reefs and marine 

species that inhabit them….” If it follows 

through on these commitments, 

SeaWorld will have a different tale to 

tell as it becomes a public voice for 

ocean creatures great and small. 

Social Media Confessions 

Social media are the newest platforms 

for storytelling and may be the most 

promising ones yet for inspiring environmental 

action through personal confessions. 

For one, they come with a massive 

audience. According to a survey 

conducted by the Pew Research Center, 

as of January 2014, 74 percent of American 

adults with Internet access used social 

networking sites. Social media also 

have a proven record of generating support 

for a wide range of causes, from 

the political to the personal. And, importantly, 

social media have a long history 

of encouraging public confessions. 

Tumblr has a “postcard confessions” 

feature that could be employed for environmental 

confessions. Facebook users 

have created many confessions pages; 

often such announcements are for social 

uses, such as admitting romantic crushes, 

but similar pages could be created to 

post collections of ecological violations 

and their aftermaths. 

We could also blog about our environmental 

missteps. I created a blog titled 

Eco-Confessions (http://ecoconfessions. 

__________ 

blogspot.com/) where I invite all those 

interested in this subject to share their 

stories of environmental transgressions 

and realizations. My own confession 

is the leadoff post: 

In my boyhood I roamed the New 

Jersey woods next to our modest 

postwar suburb. The woods provided 

every adventure in its remaining 

forest, swamps, and creek. 

Some older boys fished, trapped, 

and hunted, while my pals and I 

explored the place as very unconscious 

“naturalists.” We brought 

specimens home in jars, boxes, 

and bags. And we threw stones, a 

favorite pastime, at lots of things. 

imageBROKER Alamy Stock Photo 

Documentaries are powerful platforms for confessing environmental transgressions. In Blackfish 

(2013), former SeaWorld trainers describe inhumane treatment of killer whales and come 

to terms with their own contributions to the whales’ suffering. Here, killer whales perform at 

SeaWorld San Diego’s Shamu Stadium. 

One day I lobbed a large one at a 

blue jay and it landed square on its 

back, flattening and killing it. None 

of us rejoiced at that. It was a terrible 

violation and a warning about 

careless pursuits. 

Then we built slingshots, strong 

ones out of plywood, with real 

Wham-O rubber bands and copper 

BBs for ammunition. I could have 

gone after birds, or easily penetrated 

the shells of turtles sunning in 

the ponds, but I didn’t. The memory 

of the squashed innocent blue 

jay kept my reckless animal-killing 

ardor in check. I take my shift of 

consciousness about respecting all 

things great and small from that 

early transgressive act and the remorse 

I felt thereafter. I may be an 

environmentalist because of it. 

The Mariner Approach 

We, like Coleridge, need to find a confessional 

voice and share it in whatever medium 

is readily available, even if that is 

a face to face conversation—or a poem. 

The former fishing boat captain who 

led my trip to the Channel Islands teaches 

visitors about the importance of protecting 

the animals he once overfished. 

“In some way, I am making up for all 

that taking and waste,” he told me. “If 

I can educate people on the rides out 

and back about the need to support this 

fishery by being careful to use what they 

might catch or to leave it all alone, letting 

it take its time to replenish, then 

perhaps I’ve made up a bit for too much 

waste.” But when I asked him whether 

he’s considered sharing his own story 

with visitors, he replied, “No I haven’t. 

They didn’t come for that.” 

The need for environmental action is 

too pressing for us to wait any longer 

for an audience to come to us for our 

confessions. These stories are the missing 

element in society’s disregard of 

the analysis and warnings of scientists, 

ethicists, and humanists alike about our 

biocidal mania. If we all reach out and 

share our stories using whichever platform 

works for each of us, we can learn 

from each other and usher in a new age 

of environmental awareness, concern, 

and action. The move from personal 

violation to personal responsibility and 

public discussion is the mariner’s story. 

It also should be our own. 

Bibliography 

Coleridge, S. T. 2005. “The Rime of the Ancient 

Mariner,” in Lyrical Ballads. New York, 

Routledge. 

Kolbert, E. 2014. The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural 

History. New York: Henry Holt and 

Company. 

Leopold, A. 1949. A Sand County Almanac: And 

Sketches Here and There. New York: Oxford 

University Press. 

Pollan, M. 1991. Second Nature: A Gardener’s 

Education. New York: Grove Press. 

Sea World and the Humane Society of the United 

States. 2016. Strengthening animal welfare 

and protecting oceans and marine animals, 

joint full-page statement of Sea World’s new 

mission. Los Angeles Times (March 31). 





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Engineering 

How Paperweights Emerged from 

the Desk of Necessity 

Objects that keep papers from blowing around demonstrate the role that 

resourcefulness can play in the design process. 


The electrical engineer Charles P. 

Steinmetz (1865–1923) was legendary 

as a special consultant 

on the staff of the General Electric 

Research Laboratory in Schenectady, 

New York, making seminal contributions 

to the transmission of alternating 

current. He was a nonconformist who 

enjoyed wrestling with technical problems 

at his cabin located on the Mohawk 

River just outside the city. An iconic 

photo (see page 219) shows him working 

away in his undershirt, hunched over a 

makeshift desk in the form of a board set 

athwart the gunwales of a canoe floating 

on the water. Among the items on the 

desk-board are a box of pencils, a number 

of open books and reports (one of 

them often being the tables of logarithms 

upon which he relied for calculations), 

and the sheets of paper on which he was 

writing. It has been said that Steinmetz 

kept rocks in his canoe to weigh down 

the papers, although none were in use 

on this apparently windless day. 

Another photo of Steinmetz shows 

him dressed in a similarly casual fashion 

while working at a rustic wooden table 

on what looks like the cabin’s porch. On 

the table are the pencil box, open books, 

papers, and a slide rule, suggesting that 

he may have been making less-precise 

calculations than he was making in the 

canoe. In his mouth is a cigar, something 

he often blatantly smoked at the laboratory, 

even though signs declaring no 

Henry Petroski is the Aleksandar S. Vesic 

Professor of Civil Engineering and a professor of 

history at Duke University. His most recently published 

book is The Road Taken: The History and 

Future of America’s Infrastructure (Bloomsbury, 

2016). Address: Box 90287, Durham, NC 27708. 

smoking were ubiquitous around General 

Electric facilities. What most caught 

my eye in looking at this photo recently, 

however, are the assorted objects that 

are sitting on the books and papers, presumably 

to hold them in place lest a 

sudden breeze carry them away. 

The small objects resting on the papers 

on Steinmetz’s table include what 

When the scroll and the 

book were elevated to 

objects of near adoration, 

paraphernalia were 

developed of a quality 

worthy of coming in 

contact with them. 

appears to be a rounded stone; an almost 

cubical block that is possibly a scrap of 

wood; and what looks to be a chunk of 

masonry, maybe the broken-off corner 

of a brick. Just about anything with any 

heft can be used as a paperweight, but 

the most commonly employed things 

do have to satisfy a set of criteria: They 

do not take up much room on a desk, 

can be easily lifted and moved with one 

hand, and, unlike Steinmetz’s makeshift 

weights, usually have a certain attractiveness, 

decorativeness, and commemorative 

or sentimental value to them. 

But when a paperweight is serving its 

purpose, it little matters what it looks 

like, and it can often go unnoticed. 

As long as there has been writing 

material that could be moved by a 

gust of air, there has been a need for 

paperweights. Even users of the earliest 

forms of books, such as papyrus scrolls, 

would have been grateful for any object 

handy to keep a rolled-out scroll from 

returning to its naturally curled-up 

state. The reader’s hands themselves 

could serve this purpose, but when 

one or both of them were occupied in 

taking notes or transcribing texts, paperweights 

would have been welcome 

appurtenances in the study or library. 

What Makes a Weight? 

No sophisticated engineering was required 

to make early paperweights. 

However, even though they lack formal 

and deliberate technological design, 

the same engineering principles 

that can optimize, say, the software of 

a smartphone (a device that can also 

double as a paperweight) from prototype 

to product, can also be applied to 

their evolution. 

For a paperweight, the elementary 

requirement of just having sufficient 

heft could be met, as Steinmetz demonstrated, 

in ad hoc ways with found or 

makeshift objects. But in places where 

the scroll and the book were elevated 

to objects of near adoration in their 

own right—such as in monasteries— 

paraphernalia were developed of a 

quality worthy of coming in contact 

with rare and sacred texts. Therefore, 

in old woodcuts of scholars, monks, 

and scribes studying and copying such 

texts, the original can be seen to be held 

open by various clever devices, including 

weighted cords or strings. The descendants 

of such paperweights are 

found in use in the reading rooms of 

rare-book libraries and archives today. 




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When the private study—perhaps 

only a cubbyhole in the corner of a 

bedroom—evolved into an elaborate 

workspace—even if not much larger 

than a library carrel today—properly 

outfitting it with suitable paperweights 

and other desktop furniture became 

an objective of many a city and country 

gentleman. As the closet-size study 

grew into a full-fledged room of its own, 

capable of including a commodious 

desk, the sprawling surface had room 

for multiple piles of papers that were 

kept in place with increasingly decorative 

paperweights made of more delicate 

materials such as glass and ceramic. 

Antique examples from the 19th century, 

as well as ones deliberately made to be 

coveted, such as those produced by the 

Steuben Glass Works in Corning, New 

York, have become the object of collection 

rather than of function, with the acquisitive 

activity supported by a large 

number of books on the subject. There is 

Everett Collection/Alamy 

Enterprising newsboys, such as this young one in 1910 New York, ran some of the earliest newsstands, 

where they often employed makeshift objects (the rope and horseshoe here) as newspaper 

weights. These paperweights eventually evolved into advertising space for periodicals. 

even a Paperweight Collectors Association 

that has about 1,600 members. The 

Bergstrom-Mahler Museum of Glass in 

Neenah, Wisconsin, claims to hold more 

than 3,000 specimens, constituting “the 

most representative collection of glass 

paperweights in the world.” 

I do not have a formal collection of 

paperweights, but I have accumulated 

a number of them over the years and 

keep several of them scattered about 

my desk. And although mine may not 

be a representative sample, it does provide 

me with visual and tactile data 

points by which to test my narrative 

design hypotheses, and from which 

I can dare to generalize. Many of the 

weights I own have been presented to 

me in appreciation for my having delivered 

a lecture, and they demonstrate 

in a variety of materials the wide range 

of designs that have evolved from the 

found rocks and stones used by Steinmetz 

and his predecessors. 

Among the paperweights in my 

study are a good number bearing a 

university crest set on a 3-inch square 

or 3 3 /8-inch-diameter circular base. 

(Each of these approximately ¾-inchthick 

pieces of stone has about the 

same volume, namely, 6.75 cubic inches, 

and weighs about 12 ounces, which 

is about what my experience has 

taught me to expect of a standard desk 

paperweight of American design.) 

Most of the bases are made of marble, 

but one nonmarble example stands 

out. This one is from Curtin University 

of Technology in Perth, Australia; it 

has a 1 ½-inch-diameter cast medallion 

bearing the university’s name and 

logo set into a 3-inch diameter, softly 

rounded wooden base, identified 

on the bottom as Western Australian 

sheoak. At about 4 ounces, the Curtin 

weight is not nearly as heavy as the 

marble ones, but it certainly will hold 

down papers under even a moderate 

gust of wind or the steady blow of an 

electric fan. 

Some of the objects that I use as paperweights 

do not have that function 

as their principal one. Such adaptation 

is not an unusual phenomenon: Consumers 

often enlist things made for 

one purpose for another unrelated one. 

One such object usually close by on my 

desk is a map magnifier. It consists of a 

hemispherical acrylic prism or lens cradled 

in a handsome wooden base. The 

bottom of the prism would become 

scratched if it were slid directly across 

the face of a map, so the annular base 

holds the plastic about 1 /16 of an inch 

above the surface. Another thing that I 

recruit as a paperweight is a 3 3 /8-inchdiameter, 

6 ½-ounce cast-pewter 

traylike object that seems to have been 

designed as a drink coaster. It was presented 

to me after a talk I gave at a 

meeting organized by the Institute of 

Electrical and Electronics Engineers; 

when aided by the weight of a glass of 

water, it is well suited to holding down 

papers in the stiffest breeze. 

I have another paperweight unusual 

in design, if not in number. It is elliptical 

in shape and was cast in brass, 

making it a hefty 13 ounces. It was distributed 

to attendees of the 1997 design 

symposium sponsored by Knoll, 

the manufacturer of modern office 

and home furniture, held at the Cranbrook 

Academy of Art in Bloomfield 

Hills, Michigan. I was invited to speak 

there on the evolution of paper clip designs, 

as part of an eclectic program of 





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presentations. The opening talk was by 

the artist Michele Oka Doner, whose 

work includes jewelry, furniture, and 

public art, such as her 1.25-mile-long 

composition of 9,000 bronzes set into 

the terrazzo floor of a terminal at 

Miami International Airport. At the 

Knoll symposium she spoke about paperweights, 

and the commemorative 

one she designed was based on 

a brooch created in 1941 by 

the jewelry and furniture designer 

Harry Bertoia. 

The most recent addition 

to my collection came 

as a pleasant surprise from 

my editor, George Gibson, 

on the occasion of 

the publication of my latest 

book, The Road Taken: 

The History and Future of 

America’s Infrastructure. 

The weight is in the form of 

a small book and was carved out of 

dark green stone by a German craftsman. 

Its 4 ½-by-3-inch dimensions 

make it closest in size to what bibliographers 

call a trigesimo-secundo or 

“32mo,” indicating a volume whose 

printed sheets are folded five times 

to form 32 leaves or 64 pages. Such 

a gathering would be sewn together 

with like ones before being bound into 

a volume. The 7 /8-inch thickness of this 

stone book means it would not take 

up much room on a bookshelf or on a 

desk. Furthermore, it is so well made 

that it stands up vertically, so it can 

have a small footprint on my desk—a 

definite plus for a paperweight. The 

little green book, which Gibson finds 

“both practical…and cool and soothing,” 

weighs 1½ pounds, making it the 

heaviest paperweight I have. The only 

one that comes close in weight was not 

designed to sit on papers on a desk, 

but I do use it for that purpose. 

This other kind of paperweight has 

few collectors and, as far as I know, 

no association recognizing them. It 

is a weight designed to hold down 

not business or scholarly papers on 

a desktop but newspapers on a corner 

newsstand. The need for this kind 

of weight was a relatively recent development, 

because in its early days 

the penny newspaper was hawked by 

newsboys who held their supply of 

papers tightly under one arm while 

the other arm held up a single example 

of the evening’s news. In time, entrepreneurial 

newsboys sought to deal 

in larger quantities than they could 

tote around at one time, and so began 

to station themselves beside lecternlike 

stands that held a larger quantity 

and variety of papers. To keep the 

newspapers displayed on these modest 

stands from blowing away, they 

Cast-iron paperweights for newsstands, which 

touted publications sold there, were revived and 

improved by Mortimer Spiller starting in the 

1950s. The top weight is one he manufactured; 

the rest are from his collection. (Photographs by 

Micki Spiller, courtesy of Harley Spiller.) 

employed makeshift paperweights. 

A famous 1910 photograph by Lewis 

Hine, whose images played a significant 

role in the reformation of U.S. 

child labor laws, records one of these 

newspaper stands located at Columbus 

Circle in New York City. The 

photograph, which shows a newsboy 

barely tall enough to see over the top 

of the stand, also shows the papers being 

held down with a piece of cord or 

rope weighted down by a horseshoe 

(see page 217). 

Weighty Advertisements 

With the passage of child labor laws 

and the growth in populations of readers, 

demands for newspapers outstripped 

the ability of street-corner 

newsboys to supply them. In urban settings, 

newspapers increasingly were 

sold out of corner cigar and candy 

stores and from dedicated covered 

newsstands, early examples of which 

were little more than shacks set up 

on the sidewalk near the entrances to 

subway and elevated train stations. 

These shacks were large enough, however, 

to protect their proprietor from 

the weather and to stock an increasingly 

large variety of newspapers and 

magazines. The piles of these publications, 

displayed on a board set across 

the front of the stand, were kept 

from blowing away by means 

of horseshoes, bricks, pieces 

of wood, and other makeshift 

paperweights. From these 

evolved specialty painted castiron 

weights that advertised the 

publication that they were 

designed to sit upon. 

Metal was not used for 

such nonessential things 

during World War II, and 

so there was a hiatus in 

the manufacture and 

distribution of advertising 

paperweights. Indeed, 

many of the weights created 

before the war were melted down, 

leaving few survivors. But in 1947 

the appearance and usefulness of 

the prewar paperweights did survive 

in the memory of at least one 

young individual. Mortimer Spiller 

was a veteran working for a New 

York City advertising firm, a job that 

took him to Times Square to do some 

market research. It was a windy day, 

and newspaper pages were blowing 

all around the place. Looking for 

where they came from, he noticed 

that the newsstand operators were using 

ordinary bricks, rocks, and lesseffective 

means to hold down their papers, 

rather than the colorful advertising 

paperweights that he remembered. 

Not satisfied with his marketresearch 

job, Spiller conceived of going 

into business for himself making 

customized paperweights, which he 

would sell to the various publications. 

He would emboss the name of 

a specific publication on each weight, 

thereby advertising that magazine or 

newspaper even if the weights were 

placed on piles of rival publications, 

as they often were. Before embarking 

on his enterprise, Spiller did product 

research, studying the small numbers 

of prewar weights that were still in use 

or for sale in antique shops. What he 

found was that surviving weights were 

often badly chipped and the name of 

the publication they once advertised 

was no longer decipherable, sometimes 

because the weight had been 




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Everett Collection Historical/Alamy 

Museum of Innovation and Science 

Engineer Charles P. Steinmetz is legendary both for contributions to the transmission of alternating 

current, and for working on his own terms. He was most comfortable in rustic surroundings, 

such as a canoe-based desk (top) or cabin porch table (bottom). Steinmetz seems to have regularly 

used a variety of objects as paperweights to keep his work in place in such gusty locales. 

rendered black with the newsprint that 

it had rubbed against for years. 

Not wishing simply to replicate these 

imperfect designs, Spiller set out to improve 

upon them. He designed a paperweight 

with a border raised higher 

than the letters spelling out the name 

of the publication. In this way, the advertiser’s 

name would neither be easily 

chipped nor touch the newsprint. 

Spiller had wooden patterns of his designs 

made out of African mahogany, 

which was soft enough to be easily 

worked yet hard enough to withstand 

repeated use in forming the sand molds 

from which the iron weights would be 

cast. When he had 1½-pound samples 

in hand, Spiller visited the circulation 

managers of magazines such as Newsweek, 

Time, and Life. It was Newsweek 

that provided the first order, for 10,000 

cast and painted weights. Spiller was 

on his way to a successful business. 

In my memoir, Paperboy, about delivering 

the afternoon Long Island Press 

during the 1950s, I wrote about newspaper 

weights sitting atop piles of 

morning papers sold at a corner store. 

I described the weights as made of 

lead, which was a conflation of memories. 

Some of the weights did appear to 

me to be unadorned brick-size billets 

of metallic lead, which would have 

made them weigh about 30 pounds 

each. I should have realized a lead 

composition was ridiculous had I ever 

lifted one off the piles of papers. 

Few paperweights of any kind weigh 

anything near that much. Among those 

in Spiller’s collection, the heaviest was 

from the Wall Street Journal. It weighed 

5¼ pounds, which he considered too 

heavy. The cast-iron ones he manufactured 

weighed about 1¼ pounds—just 

right, in his estimation, to hold down 

the papers but not so heavy that a customer 

could not easily slip one out of 

the pile. Like all things practical, the 

design of a paperweight reflects considerations 

of functionality, aesthetics, 

and cost. The choice of a paperweight, 

more often than not, depends simply 

upon what is close at hand. 

Acknowledgment 

I became aware of Mortimer Spiller’s 

achievements and his collection of newspaper 

weights through his son, Harley Spiller, 

with whom I had previously developed 

an unrelated correspondence. Years ago, in 

exchange for a copy of Paperboy, Harley 

sent me one of his father’s Life magazine 

paperweights and then a copy of his master’s 

thesis, which provided the ultimate 

inspiration for this column. 

Selected Bibliography 

Lukas, Paul. 2005. A record for keeping what others 

throw away. New York Times (August 3). 

Spiller, Harley Judd. 2010. On Newsstands 

Now!: A History of Paperweights and Newsstand 

Advertising. M.A.L.S. Thesis. New 

School for Social Research. 





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Coexisting with Wildfire 

Promoting the right kind of fire—and smarter development—is safer and more 

cost-effective than fighting a losing battle. 

Max A. Moritz and Scott Gabriel Knowles 

Standing in a quiet, burned-out 

homesite overlooking the coastal 

town of Santa Barbara, California, 

six years after flames 

tore through this community in 2009, 

the sense of both terror and loss were 

still palpable. The fire-adapted plants 

on the chaparral-covered hillsides 

were regenerating, as they have done 

after wildfires for thousands of years. 

Many of the homes that burned nearby 

had been rebuilt, stronger and more 

fire-resistant, with the hope that they 

will better withstand the next wildfire 

to sweep through the area. But in 

those gutted locations that have yet 

to be rebuilt—and possibly never will 

be—evidence of personal tragedies remains. 

During our field trip in search 

of a path toward coexistence with 

wildfire, its role as a recurring natural 

hazard was made real. Unlearned lessons 

still lay among the charred debris. 

As researchers, we come from different 

backgrounds: a biogeographer 

with an emphasis on spatial analysis 

of wildfire and an historian focusing 

on disasters and public policy. Our 

paths had crossed before, during writing 

of the 2011 book The Disaster Experts: 

Mastering Risk in Modern America. 

In subsequent discussions about 

wildfires and their effects on people 

and ecosystems, it became increasingly 

obvious to us that there is a disconnect 

between research findings and the 

Max A. Moritz is a Cooperative Extension specialist 

in wildfire in the Environmental Science, Policy, 

and Management Department at the University of 

California, Berkeley; he is also affiliated with Santa 

Barbara County Cooperative Extension, a local 

office of the University of California’s Division of 

Agriculture and Natural Resources. Scott Gabriel 

Knowles is associate professor of history at Drexel 

University. He is the author of The Disaster Experts: 

Mastering Risk in Modern America, and 

is working on a new book, The United States of 

Disaster. Email: ____________ 

mmoritz@berkeley.edu 

policies that can make communities 

safer. Policy and planning are slow to 

adopt the wealth of scientific knowledge 

about why homes burn and how 

to diminish fire-related threats. 

Research has long shown that fire 

is a necessary, natural disturbance in 

many ecosystems. Even so, much of 

society’s response to fire is still reactive, 

based on outdated notions of “the 

wildfire problem” as simply one of 

fuel buildup—an unwelcome remnant 

of the U.S. Forest Service’s focus over 

many decades on putting out fires at 

all costs. Although forests that have accumulated 

dense thickets of younger 

trees are a problem in some areas, it is 

not the only story—not even the most 

important one—when it comes to lessening 

the impact of wildfire on human 

communities. This misunderstanding is 

pervasive, hindering discussions about 

what the best policy solutions may be. 

The disconnect between knowledge 

and policy stems largely from current 

views of wildfire. In contrast to 

other natural hazards, the primary response 

is to fight fires rather than to 

accept them as a recurring fact of life 

in fire-prone ecosystems. In between 

such events, the aim is often to fight the 

vegetation that may fuel the next fire. 

Fire creates the illusion of being controllable, 

unlike other natural hazards 

such as hurricanes, earthquakes, and 

tornadoes. Rather than fighting them, 

the typical response to many natural 

hazards is to prepare for them, to accommodate 

their inevitable occurrence, 

and to reduce the risk of losses where 

possible. In dangerous locations, building 

codes and land-use planning are 

established to make living there more 

survivable or to discourage building 

there in the first place. 

Learning from disaster, however, is 

not as straightforward as we all wish 

it could be. The process has been a 

slow and painful one. Even when the 

data are collected and the science is 

clear, impediments to intelligent policy 

stand in the way. Inevitably, there 

is pressure from developers to keep 

building despite disastrous outcomes, 

and elected officials are often unwilling 

to restrain construction or enforce 

stringent land-use policies in a way 

that could curb economic growth. 

Hurricanes Katrina and Sandy have 

not slowed coastal population expansion, 

for example, despite their massive 

impacts. There are also competing 

messages and real difficulties in communicating 

risk to citizens who may 

feel that disaster could happen, but it 

might not affect them. 

In the case of wildfire, increasingly 

destructive fire seasons and alarming 

losses of homes and lives have stirred 

awareness in recent years. For example, 

the 2015 fire season broke records in 

the amount of area burned across the 

United States. In northern California, 

where years of drought have parched 

the landscape, almost 3,000 structures 

burned in just two wildfires alone. The 

Fort McMurray Fire in Alberta, Canada, 

which has consumed more than 2,400 

buildings and burned across more than 

2,200 square miles at the time of this 

writing, is another stunning example. 

Conditions are relatively severe across 

much of western North America, indicating 

that the 2016 fire season should 

again be one for the record books. 

Unfortunately, climate change may 

make such periods of extended warm 

drought more common in many locations. 

This trend, combined with expanding 

development on fire-prone 

landscapes, makes learning to coexist 

with wildfire an urgent priority. 

At a basic level, we care about fire 

because it burns homes and risks lives 

of both firefighters and those living 

on fire-prone landscapes. Their stories 

continuously make the news each fire 

season. How many more fatalities will 




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Almost 300 homes were lost during a 2008–2009 series of wildfires in the hills of the Santa 

Barbara region of California, including the May 2009 Jesusita wildfire, shown here burning in 

the foothills above Santa Barbara on its first night, ultimately incurring a cost of $20 million. 

As climate change alters temperature and precipitation regimes, wildfires in some regions are 

becoming more likely. Despite ample research informing ways to plan for fire and prevent 

damages, pervasive misunderstandings hinder better policy. 

have to occur before people address 

the issue comprehensively? To do so, 

policy makers will have to consider climate 

change and expansion of development 

onto increasingly fire-prone 

landscapes, or the wildfire problem 

simply becomes more difficult and 

dangerous with each passing year. 

How Fiery Is the Future? 

Whether a given location will be more 

fire-prone in the future depends a 

great deal on what controls wildfire 

occurrence there now. Many ecosystems 

have relatively high productivity 

and plenty of vegetation to burn when 

conditions are right. Yet that plant 

biomass may not become flammable 

very often, if there is no warm and dry 

season during which fire is possible. 

Tropical and temperate rainforests are 

ecosystems in which this tends to be 

the case. If climate change results in 

more episodic droughts or warmer 

and drier summers on average, these 

environments are likely to experience 

more fire activity. At the other end of 

the spectrum, many arid desert regions 

experience hot and dry weather 

that would readily support vegetation 

fires for much of the year, but there is 

little to burn. Even modest increases in 

future rainfall for such regions could 

thus lead to greater fuel accumulation 

rates and more fire activity. Polar deserts, 

which currently have very limited 

windows each year when it is warm 

enough for plants to grow, may also 

see more fire in the future as temperatures 

rise and fire-conducive weather 

conditions become more common. In 

addition to sufficient plant growth and 

a periodic fire season, recurring wildfires 

require a source of ignition. 

How these three basic constraints— 

plant biomass, warm and dry conditions, 

and an ignition source—come 

together in space and time determines 

Cody Duncan/Alamy Stock Photo 

the level of fire activity that a given 

region experiences on average. Easing 

one of the constraints—by promoting 

more ignitions, faster biomass accumulation 

rates, or more extreme dry 

seasons—will typically lead to increases 

in wildfires, up to a point where 

one of the other constraints may become 

limiting. Wildfire thus has certain 

environmental requirements for 

it to persist on different landscapes, 

not unlike biological organisms. The 

subdiscipline of pyrogeography has 

emerged as the study of broadscale 

patterns of wildfire, the controls on its 

distribution, and its effects. The subfield 

has borrowed methods from and 

built upon other ecological research 

that studies how species are distributed 

across a region and how their ranges 

might shift with climate change. 

The first step in modeling average 

fire frequencies is to quantify the gradient 

between environments that are 

relatively marginal for wildfire and 

those that are much more optimal. The 

global contrast between such areas can 

be striking over only moderate distances, 

as shown by the lack of fires in 

the Sahara Desert of the African conti- 





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climate models—of which there are 

more than 20 in use—that the Earth 

will continue to warm as greenhouse 

gas emissions accumulate in the atmosphere. 

Future patterns in the timing 

and amounts of precipitation over 

the next century, however, are much 

less consistent. Realistic temporal sequencing 

that might be important for 

fire in a specific location is even more 

difficult for the climate models. Good 

predictions of how often wet winters 

will be followed by successive drought 

years, for example, or the frequency of 

El Niño–related warm and dry winters 

(such as those that have driven the 

Fort McMurray Fire) are simply not 

yet possible for the coming decades. 

Our confidence in future wildfire 

trends is therefore directly linked to 

the robustness and agreement among 

the global climate models themselves. 

How humans might change future 

fire activity is also a source of uncertainty. 

At local scales, humans can alter 

the number and timing of ignitions— 

people both start and extinguish fires. 

One way to address this uncertainty 

is through the use of relatively coarse 

spatial resolutions in the predictions, 

which allows for areas to be treated as 

if ignition sources are never the limiting 

factor, because larger areas are more 

likely to include some sort of ignition 

source. Given that humans and lightning 

already provide ample ignitions 

across most regions—and future trends 

in both sources are thought to be increasing 

because of population expansion 

and climate change—this modelburned 

fraction (percent year –1 ) 

(averaged over 1997–2015) 

0.0 0.2 0.5 1.0 2.0 5.0 10.0 20.0 50.0 100.0 

The occurrences of fires around the globe can identify the broadscale environmental variables 

that affect their likelihood across different ecosystems. (Image from globalfiredata.org.) 

___________ 

nent and the abundance of fire in the 

savanna ecosystems just to the south. 

(See the map above.) These maps of recent 

fire patterns are then intersected 

with maps of temperature and precipitation 

variables that capture longterm 

rates of biomass accumulation 

and the typical length and intensity of 

the dry season. Statistical relationships 

between existing “baseline” levels of 

fire activity and current climate patterns 

are then estimated, so that the 

model’s ability to recreate existing 

wildfire patterns is credible. The models 

are then projected into the future, 

driven by predictions of future climate 

scenarios, some of which show only 

modest shifts and others that indicate 

much more worrisome outcomes. 

Despite recent advances, projecting 

long-term future fire patterns involves 

several challenges and assumptions. A 

major source of uncertainty is predicting 

how the climate will shift in different 

parts of the world. There is fairly 

consistent agreement among global 

This homesite, which was burned in the 2009 Jesusita Fire, remains a stark reminder of the risks 

of living on a fire-prone landscape, even six years later. (Photograph courtesy of Scott Knowles.) 




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ing decision is reasonable and useful. 

It also keeps the influence of other finescale 

human activities, such as developing 

otherwise flammable landscapes or 

suppressing wildfires in higher population 

areas, from obscuring dominant 

climate-related controls on vegetation 

characteristics and fire-season severity. 

Another advantage is that predictions 

more closely match the scale of 

typical global climate model outputs, 

all of which are most reliable at coarse 

resolutions. Just as one might have 

more confidence in future projections 

of long-term climate conditions across 

broad areas (for example, a prediction 

of mean annual temperature over 30- 

year periods across 100-kilometer grid 

cells), fire model predictions perform 

better at similar scales. 

Although there is substantial variation 

among future climate projections, 

global fire modeling studies do show 

some consistencies. One of the most 

striking salient predictions is that fire 

activity will increase across much of 

the northern hemisphere. Many of 

the models show the western United 

States, for example, becoming increasingly 

prone to fire. In some cases, 

where decreases are predicted, it is after 

several decades of warmer, drier 

conditions that eventually lead to lessproductive 

conditions and much lower 

fuel-accumulation rates. There is less 

certainty about future fire activity in 

areas sensitive to fluctuations in precipitation 

(for example, when there are 

more frequent droughts in moisturerich 

rainforests or more wet years in 

moisture-poor deserts), at least based 

on climate change alone. Such uncertainties 

make fire-related management 

and conservation decisions even more 

crucial in the carbon- and biodiversityrich 

rainforests along the Earth’s equatorial 

regions, already plagued by 

human-caused deforestation fires. 

The Right Kind of Fire 

People tend to look at fires as simply 

dangerous and damaging, but from 

an ecological perspective they are often 

natural and even essential. For instance, 

many plants from California 

chaparral shrublands are adapted to 

fire, with some seeds germinating only 

after heat- or smoke-induced cues. The 

“right kind of fire” for different organisms—the 

natural frequencies, sizes, intensities, 

and seasonal timing of those 

fires—is not always well known, however. 

In addition, the level to which a 

given fire regime may have deviated 

from historical norms is unclear for 

many parts of the world. Some dry coniferous 

forests in the western United 

States, such as the lower elevations of 

the Sierra Nevada Mountains in California, 

have not burned much over the 

past century. These areas therefore may 

need a reintroduction of fire to maintain 

the organisms living there and curb 

Realism About Fire Hazards 

Federal policy directs fuel treatments on public lands 

and assists with firefighting costs and disaster relief, 

but it is not always the determining factor in decision 

making at the scales of county, municipality, or homeowner. 

In contrast, state-level policy can shape land use, but natural 

hazards straddle administrative boundaries, and landuse 

laws are often jealously guarded by local authorities. At 

the most local levels citizens are empowered to protect their 

homes and communities, yet they often lack the resources 

and expert capacity to know the state of the art in fire science. 

This problem of “disaster federalism” is not unique to 

wildfire, but it is especially acute for a hazard that affects 

large areas and takes shape over generations. 

Two examples offer insight into how communities have 

dealt with wildfire. The first is Rancho Santa Fe, a community 

at extremely high risk of wildfire in San Diego County 

that adopted a “shelter-in-place” perspective from the outset. 

In theory, “shelter-in-place” means that the community 

is built so residents may wait out fires at home instead of 

evacuating too late—clogging highways and placing themselves 

at risk. Regulations are strict, and residents must 

have landscaping approved by fire-district officials. Roads 

are wide to allow for emergency vehicles, and water capacity 

is maximized. According to the homeowners’ guide, 

structures use “boxed-in, heavy timber, or ignition-resistant 

eaves with no vents… residential fire sprinklers… a minimum 

100-foot defensible space surrounding all structures… 

a ‘Class-A,’ ignition-resistant roof… dual-pane (one being 

tempered) glass windows, [and] chimneys with spark arrestors 

containing a minimum ½'' screen.” In particular, several 

of these structural enhancements guard against embers that 

can be blown long distances ahead of fire, lodging in nooks 

and crannies and smoldering unseen, eventually burning 

down a house. These requirements may be a dream come 

true for fire protection engineers, but they are decidedly not 

the norm across the nation. As a high-income community 

that has used the shelter-in-place concept from its inception, 

Rancho Santa Fe has the luxury of adopting this approach 

in the face of the inevitable, which arrived in the 2007 

Witch Creek Fire. This event caused half a million Californians, 

including the majority of those in Rancho Santa 

Fe, to evacuate. National Public Radio cited Rancho Santa 

Fe’s relatively light damages as a result of shelter-in-place 

design, and their fire chief Cliff Hunter came to national 

prominence because of it. 

A second example comes from the hills above Santa 

Barbara in the tiny community of Painted Cave. To varying 

degrees, residents there have adapted their properties 

to live with fire, knowing that the likelihood is high. The 

homes are much older than those in Rancho Santa Fe, and 

the approach to fire management is not nearly as centralized. 

In Painted Cave, the approach has a flair of fierce 

individualism. The local volunteer fire departments and the 

surrounding communities maintain fire equipment and are 

trained to provide initial attack in emergencies. They are 

not career firefighters, however, and work in conjunction 

with local fire agencies. During any given wildfire incident, 

roughly half the inhabitants in these mountain communities 

might end up choosing to evacuate. Residents generally 

understand that the cost of living in one of the most beautiful 

places in America also means living with hazard, not 

pretending it doesn’t exist or relying on outside assistance. 

The approaches in Rancho Santa Fe and Painted Cave are 

different (using codes versus community preparedness). 

Yet results are similar, in terms of accommodating natural 

hazards. This intensely local approach to living with fire is 

analogous to the way Texans live with tornadoes and Floridians 

live with hurricanes. Theirs is a hazards realism that 

should be examined for its applicability to other communities 

throughout the West. 





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change in fire frequency 

1951–2000 to 2051–2100 

change in forest fire danger index (FFDI) 1970–1999 to 2070–2099 

A1B, three-model mean RCP2.6, HadGEM2-ES RCP8.5, HadGEM2-ES 

a b c 

change in fire frequency (percent per century) 

change in FFDI 

–50 0 +50 –4 –2 2 4 6 8 10 12 

multimodel agreement on change in 

change in fire frequency between 2004 and 2100 

fire probability 1971–2000 to 2070–2099 

A2 B1, GISS A2, GISS 

d e f 

multimodel agreement 

decrease 

increase 

fire counts per year 

67 low 

agreement (percent) 

the risk of out-of-control wildfires. Exactly 

which forests need restoration and 

how important fuel accumulation may 

be in the face of climate change, however, 

is a matter of debate. In contrast, 

fire appears not to have been a strong 

evolutionary force in some ecosystems, 

such as deserts and tropical rainforests, 

where increases in fire could be disastrous 

for their conservation. 

The resilience of fire-prone ecosystems 

may depend, in part, on fire’s 

role in facilitating range shifts of species 

affected by climate change. To survive 

and regenerate in suitable environments, 

many species will need to track 

shifting climate conditions, sometimes 

across large distances and at relatively 

fast rates. By opening up space and resources 

for colonization, fire will therefore 

assist such shifts across different 

parts of the landscape. At the same 

time, it will eliminate certain species 

67 90 –1,000 –100 –10 –1 1 10 100 1,000 

A comparison of global fire projections shows possible increases and decreases in future fire 

activity. Models show strong agreement that fire probability will increase across much of 

North America, Europe, and northern Asia. (Maps from Settele, J., et al., 2014. Terrestrial and 

inland water systems. In: Climate Change 2014: Impacts, Adaptation, and Vulnerability. Part A: 

Global and Sectoral Aspects. Contribution of Working Group II to the Fifth Assessment Report 

of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. New York: Cambridge University Press.) 

from areas where climate change is 

making it harder for them to reproduce 

and survive, risking local extinctions 

in some cases. There will be tradeoffs. 

Nonetheless, the natural landscape 

variation that most fires create should 

increase ecosystem resilience to climate 

change’s effects, because it provides a 

diverse set of environments and thus 

wider potential for many species’ persistence. 

Contrary to what many people 

assume, fire can be a factor that will 

help some ecosystems respond to climate 

change, if managed carefully. 

A fundamental challenge is that people’s 

tolerance for fire on the landscape, 

either as wildfire or controlled burns, 

is linked to where and how we build 

communities. The risk to human lives 

and homes will inevitably dominate 

decision-making about fire and its potential 

ecological roles. Uncontrolled 

wildfires need to be fought as they approach 

places where vulnerable people 

live, regardless of population densities 

there. Even for planned fires, human 

acceptance of nearby flames or smoke 

from more distant prescribed burns is 

often low. In the context of fire, social 

resilience and ecosystem resilience may 

not always be directly compatible. 

Suppressing fire has become extremely 

expensive, as indicated by 

the debates last year over U.S. Forest 

Service “fire borrowing,” when funds 

are funneled from fire prevention and 

forest management initiatives to fight 

current wildfires. From 1995 to 2015, 

the U.S. Forest Service has seen its firerelated 

expenses climb from 16 percent 

to more than 50 percent of its annual 

budget—with the projection climbing 

to 67 percent of the budget by 2025. 

After wildfires do enough damage to 

become defined as disasters in human 

communities, even more public funds 

are spent. Wildfires have become a 

massive financial burden on taxpayers. 

Hazard Versus Vulnerability 

Some natural disasters, such as hurricanes 

and earthquakes, happen 

relatively rapidly and then drastically 




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affect tens of thousands of people. 

Such “rapid disaster” events may be 

difficult to predict, and damage is 

caused largely by the physical impacts 

of the event itself. “Slow disasters”— 

events that play out over months or 

even years, such as droughts—may 

also devastate populations over broad 

areas. These events, however, can be 

more predictable in how they strike 

and what their effects will be. 

Wildfires, which occasionally reach 

the “disaster” designation by Federal 

Emergency Management Agency 

(FEMA) standards, fit neither the rapid 

nor slow category well. This is part of 

the reason why people’s responses to 

them are so badly designed. Wildfires 

are short-lived, with most lasting days 

to weeks. Fatalities and damage to 

buildings and other structures are typically 

experienced during the fire itself, 

not its aftermath. Fire spread can be 

erratic as it progresses across the landscape, 

and losses are therefore often 

difficult to predict. In these ways, wildfires 

are like other rapid natural hazards. 

Repercussions in human terms 

tend to be incremental, however, with 

relatively small numbers of lives and 

homes lost during most fire seasons, at 

least in comparison to some other natural 

hazards. Wildfire impacts also have 

a strong socioeconomic underpinning, 

related to where and how we build our 

communities over the long term. 

So although wildfire as a natural hazard 

may be more like a rapid event, the 

human vulnerabilities side of the equation 

falls into the slow-event category. 

To put it another way, elected officials 

have great incentives to react to disasters 

as they unfold, but far fewer 

incentives to take far-reaching steps toward 

disaster reduction. The slowness 

of the risk aggregation processes (fuel 

build-up, development in wildfire corridors) 

makes it hard to measure and 

challenging to govern. Although not 

unique to wildfire, these disconnects 

have strong cultural roots in the United 

States and important ramifications. 

Management of fire hazard in the 

United States has long been the domain 

of the Forest Service. As a federal 

agency overseeing vast expanses 

of fire-prone land, it has led the way 

in researching topics including how 

wildfires kill individual trees and how 

fire spreads across complex terrain. 

Emphasis is on forested environments, 

given the mission of the agency, but the 

Forest Service also manages millions 

of acres of nonforested lands. Because 

wildfires historically have been seen 

as a threat to natural resources, fire 

suppression emerged as a priority in 

much of what the agency does. Out of 

an annual budget of almost $5 billion, 

more than half is now dedicated to putting 

out wildfires. It is not surprising 

that reducing fire hazard is a key focus 

of the agency. Because fuel load (the 

amount of vegetation) and structure 

(affecting whether the flames are on 

Retrofitting Vulnerable Structures 

the ground or reach into tree canopies) 

can be strong drivers of fire hazard, it is 

also not surprising that there has traditionally 

been a strong emphasis on fuel 

reduction. Through time this theme 

has become embedded in the culture 

of the entire fire service, including federal, 

state, and local agencies, and it 

informs public perception of what “the 

wildfire problem” is. 

Understanding and addressing 

human vulnerabilities to fire, unlike 

Because building codes have become stronger in many areas through 

time, older homes can have the greatest inherent vulnerabilities to ignition 

during wildfire. For example, traditional wooden shingle roofs 

are a very common source of ignition and home loss in established communities 

across the western United States. As burning embers are blown into 

neighborhoods from nearby wildfires, such construction features can be the 

weakest link, often triggering a devastating home-to-home progression of fire 

spread. In the context of home vulnerabilities to wildfire, it is basically true 

that one is only as safe as one’s neighbor. 

Despite solid research about structure vulnerabilities and how to retrofit 

them, public grant funding for mitigation is relatively rare in the case of wildfire. 

In contrast, grants for structural retrofits to minimize earthquake, flood, 

and wind damage are much more common. Wildfire-related grants, from both 

federal and state sources, overwhelmingly tend to focus on fuel reduction. 

An exceptional success story exists in the region of Big Bear, California, located 

in the mountains above Los Angeles. In 2008, awards of more than $1 

million in FEMA funding were granted to local organizations that supported a 

campaign to eliminate wood roofs. In addition to aiding in the replacement of 

hundreds of vulnerable roofs, local ordinances were eventually passed to ban 

them entirely. Additional grant funds have been awarded to continue this trend, 

and we think they should continue to be expanded to help other communities. 

Few homes survived the 2003 Cedar Fire as it ravaged the San Diego, California, community 

of Scripps Ranch, shown here after the fire. One of the remaining homes (circled) had 

just had its wooden roof replaced with a fire-resistant one, against the wishes of the local 

homeowner’s association. Studies have shown that structures with wooden roofs can be 

up to 20 times more likely to be destroyed in a wildfire, depending on their distance from 

flammable vegetation. (Image courtesy of Richard Halsey.) 





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Homes often burn because of flying embers from a fire that is not necessarily nearby. In the 

absence of wood shingle roofs, vulnerable vents that allow embers into the attic above or crawlspace 

below a house cause many ignitions. For several homes lost during the 2007 Angora Fire 

near South Lake Tahoe, California, such as the one shown above, adjacent vegetation was not 

the culprit. (Image courtesy of the U.S. Forest Service Lake Tahoe Basin Management Unit.) 

reacting to fire hazard itself, involve 

a much more diffuse and decentralized 

set of players. This is another factor 

that has prevented the adoption 

of more logical strategies. No single 

agency or culture leads the way in 

educating homeowners about their 

particular evacuation challenges and 

home-ignition weaknesses, both of 

which can vary immensely. A given 

community may learn about these issues 

from their Fire Safe Council, or 

another organization (such as www. ____ 

________ 

firewise.org, www.fireadapted.org), _______________ if 

firefighters in the area do not have the 

resources for such programs. Alternatively, 

some property insurance companies 

offer assessments. 

The information that homeowners 

get, if they seek it at all, can thus be inconsistent 

or overly general. Building 

codes and land-use planning are notoriously 

local in their authority, and 

practices can vary across administrative 

boundaries. Many vulnerabilities 

to wildfire, once in place, can only be 

addressed relatively slowly through 

changing people’s behaviors or retrofitting 

individual structures. A variety 

of impediments—in law, in political 

will, in traditions of risk tolerance— 

therefore exist in identifying and attenuating 

human vulnerabilities, despite 

their importance in reducing losses of 

lives and homes. 

The basic message that the public 

tends to hear from fire-related agencies 

is an urgent one about fuel reduction, 

both at the landscape scale and 

immediately around their homes. Such 

measures may address hazard-related 

concerns (such as lowering flame 

lengths or slowing rates of fire spread), 

but do little to mitigate vulnerabilities. 

For example, if the zone surrounding 

a structure has been cleared of flammable 

vegetation, it is considered by 

firefighters to be a relatively safe place 

for fire suppression forces to defend 

the home, if they are present during a 

wildfire. But if the roads in a neighborhood 

are too narrow for fire trucks or 

if many homes have highly combustible 

wood-shake shingle roofs, such 

factors may render these homes lost in 

Some states, including California, have 

mapped fire hazards and are using this information 

to improve decision making about 

where and how homes and infrastructure 

are built. Such maps are crucial for local and 

state agencies to plan well for fire. (Image 

from the California Department of Forestry 

and Fire Protection.) 




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the event of fire. (See the sidebar on page 

225 to learn more about addressing vulnerabilities 

to fire.) Firefighters may not be 

safe defending structures in these circumstances, 

and with limited resources 

they would need to focus on homes 

that have a better chance of surviving. 

Public messaging about fuels is therefore 

often out of sync with what is actually 

defensible and why homes might 

burn in the first place. Public funding 

for mitigation is also disproportionately 

aimed at hazard reduction, instead of 

addressing vulnerabilities to loss. 

Trial by Fire 

To finally make lasting progress in our 

struggle to coexist with wildfire, a first 

step is to accept that fuel reduction is 

not a panacea. Managing fuels to reduce 

fire hazard is certainly an important 

consideration in many locations, 

but it is clear that the home-loss problem 

is as much about vulnerabilities 

as it is about hazards. Homeowners 

must understand their local risks and 

take action accordingly. This awareness 

may require difficult decisions 

about evacuation options, including 

when evacuation itself may not be the 

safest choice. This issue is extremely 

controversial, but agencies responsible 

for wildfire response and public safety 

will need to confront it directly as more 

people inhabit fire-prone landscapes. 

Retrofitting structures that are already 

located in fire-prone areas is clearly a priority, 

and it often makes economic sense, 

too: The one-time cost of, say, replacing 

attic or crawlspace vents that are vulnerable 

to ember entry may be very low 

(maybe $25 to 75 each), and the protection 

they provide should be permanent. 

In contrast, vegetation-reduction efforts 

have uncertain effectiveness and must 

be revisited frequently—ranging from 

annually for grassy fuels to decadally for 

forested environments—without ever 

stopping. Public grant funding should 

thus be widely available for such retrofits, 

just as it is for fuel-reduction projects. 

If insurance companies were more 

willing to reward parcel-level mitigation 

activities, they could help to greatly reduce 

structure vulnerabilities to ignition. 

Proactive, long-term strategies must 

also include mapping fire hazards 

across broad scales, so that future communities 

can be designed and located 

more strategically. This information is 

fundamental to how we address living 

on landscapes prone to other natural 

hazards, and wildfire-hazard maps 

should similarly guide where and how 

we build. In addition, the biophysical 

controls on wildfire do not stop at administrative 

city or state boundaries, 

and neither should our hazard maps. 

State and federal agencies charged 

with fire response over large areas 

must therefore adopt or develop hazard 

maps over these domains. Fortunately, 

there are examples of how this 

mapping can be done using scientifically 

valid data and methods; one 

example is the Fire Hazard Severity 

Zone mapping process in California. 

The maps should then guide building 

codes and land-use planning decisions 

so that we build our future communities 

in less-vulnerable ways and in the 

least-hazardous parts of the landscape. 

In many cases, by simply concentrating 

development in safer areas, the same 

number of houses may be built. Clustering 

development, and otherwise arranging 

homes to minimize their exposure 

to likely future wildfires, must 

also be incorporated at local scales. 

Given that public funding can alter 

development decisions on hazardprone 

landscapes, we must make sure 

taxpayers are not inadvertently subsidizing 

or incentivizing future building 

there. For example, federal funds flow 

from both the Department of Transportation 

and the Department of Housing 

and Urban Development to the states, 

and in many cases these funds then 

support new housing developments. 

How often are public funds being used 

to build homes that will be lost to a future 

wildfire? Regardless of the natural 

hazard in question, such funds should 

prioritize development in low-hazard 

areas. Legislation must be passed that 

directly links federal agency funding 

to requirements about building on the 

least hazardous portions of the landscape, 

as it flows from U.S. taxpayers 

to the states. 

Adapting to climate change has 

led to new ideas in urban design that 

are perfectly suited to coexisting with 

wildfire, even if developed for other 

natural hazards. Passive survivability is 

now a building strategy, so that both 

a structure and the people inside can 

survive a disaster involving the loss 

of life support systems (for example, 

to maintain livable temperatures for 

several days without air conditioning 

or supplemental heat). In areas subject 

to flooding or sea level rise, this 

strategy also incorporates designing 

the building to temporarily withstand 

higher water levels. Given advances in 

fire-resistant construction, similar strategies 

should be adopted for fire-prone 

landscapes. More holistically including 

wildfire into green-building standards 

is another promising route. Leadership 

in Energy and Environmental Design 

(LEED) certification, for instance, currently 

includes criteria for passive survivability 

and for minimizing structure 

vulnerabilities to ignition, but they are 

not integrated so people could safely 

shelter in place if they were not able to 

evacuate from a wildfire in time 

Wildfires are inevitable and often 

as uncontrollable as earthquakes and 

floods, but we’re still working to break 

the pathological feedback loop of poor 

planning and fighting fires after it’s too 

late. With better land-use planning and 

smarter development, our communities 

can avoid the kinds of losses that 

we’ve repeatedly witnessed in California 

and are seeing now in Fort McMurray. 

There are solutions to the increasing 

trends in wildfire-driven losses, but 

they require everyone to rethink their 

assumptions about preventing wildfires 

and to focus more on where and 

how we build communities. 

Bibliography 

Knowles, S. G. 2012. The Disaster Experts: Mastering 

Risk in Modern America. Philadelphia: 

University of Pennsylvania Press. 

Krawchuk, M. A., and M. A. Moritz. 2014. 

Burning issues: Statistical analyses of global 

fire data to inform assessments of environmental 

change. Environmetrics 25:472–481. 

Krawchuk, M. A., M. A. Moritz, M. A. Parisien, 

J. Van Dorn, and K. Hayhoe. 2009. Global 

pyrogeography: The current and future distribution 

of wildfire. PloS ONE 4:e5102. 

Mann, M. L., et al. 2016. Incorporating anthropogenic 

influences into fire probability 

models: Effects of human activity and climate 

change on fire activity in California. 

PLoS ONE 11:e0153589. 

Moritz, M. A., et al. 2012. Climate change and disruptions 

to global fire activity. Ecosphere 3:49. 

Moritz, M.A., et al. 2014. Learning to coexist 

with wildfire. Nature 515:58–66. 

Parisien, M. A., and M. A. Moritz. 2009. Environmental 

controls on the distribution of 

wildfire at multiple spatial scales. Ecological 

Monographs 79:127–154. 

For relevant Web links, consult this 

issue of American Scientist Online: 

http://www.americanscientist.org/ 

issues/id.121/past.aspx 





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A Constructive Chemical 

Conversation 

Precisely timed series of interventions lead to the growth of 

a variety of complex, three-dimensional microscale structures. 

Alison Grinthal, Wim L. Noorduin, and Joanna Aizenberg 

Long before life covered the Earth with 

intricately patterned forms, its precursor 

materials started talking. Showering 

each other with synthesis byproducts 

and confronting each other with changing surfaces, 

they fueled, slowed, blocked, diverted, shaped 

each other’s growth—answering to each other 

at every turn as, for better and for worse, they 

began to shape and orient as one. Generations 

later, bacteria inherited the dialog, their inner skeletons 

and outer skins trading signals in winding 

paths over their growing surfaces as they curved 

into boomerangs, stars, and corkscrews. But as 

they multiplied, their diffusing signals transformed 

their sculpting into a throbbing social scene—the 

whole group twisting and elongating in sync, 

sprouting into fractals and labyrinths. As life diversified, 

packs of nerves, streamlined by continuous 

dialog with their sheaths, followed their noses in 

and out of bundles as crosstalk generated landscapes 

of signals at their tips. Spiraling signal 

networks, feeding into and out of a chorus of 

intracellular dialogs, wound plant cells into finely 

graded spiraling lattices. The entire living world 

still talks nonstop, spinning live chemical maps of 

conversations—sketching, navigating, and negotiating 

their architectural plans in front of themselves 

as they grow. 

Alison Grinthal is a research scientist in the School of Engineering 

and Applied Sciences at Harvard University. Wim 

L. Noorduin leads the self-organizing matter group at the 

FOM Institute AMOLF in The Netherlands. Joanna Aizenberg 

is a professor of materials science and of chemistry and 

chemical biology, and codirector of the Kavli Institute for 

Bionano Science and Technology, at Harvard University. 

Email for Grinthal: agrinth@fas.harvard.edu 

_____________ 

What are they talking about? The weather, 

food—news from the environment is continually 

taken in, shuttled through the pinball of signals, 

and channeled into the living map. The feedback 

network creates a mind-boggling diversity 

of options at every step, but at the same time imposes 

checks and balances that keep the system 

from randomly running wild. As the environment 

changes—altering growth rates, turning up and 

down responses—the dialogs recalibrate, reconfigure 

the landscape of signals and gradients, and 

invoke hidden worlds of subtle to radical alternatives. 

Nerves that avoided each other suddenly 

become smitten; short, fat bacteria shoot into 

long filaments or sprout two heads; tree cells meander 

in gradually shifting turns and waves. The 

environment becomes an inseparable participant 

in the conversation: Patterns, networks, and communities 

become stories of their encounters with 

changing oceans or atmospheres. 

Building in the nonliving world is a different 

story, usually requiring chisels, hammers, and 

molds. But at the microscale, where our sculpting 

tools begin to fall short, dialog becomes highly 

effective. Materials that form together from the 

start create precise, versatile feedback systems, 

addressing errors as they happen, coaxing rigid 

crystals into winding curves, producing complex 

shapes that neither part could make alone. Yet 

life suggests that the behaviors we see may be 

only half the conversation; such systems could be 

brewing with possibilities and choices unfolding 

all the time. Landscape architect Anne Spirn has 

proposed, “To design wisely is to read ongoing dialogues 

in a place … and to imagine how to join 

the conversation.” To explore, we started talking. 

continued 




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A diversity of complex microscale structures can be created when 

researchers participate in ongoing chemical dialogs that guide the 

structures’ growth. When a solution is infused with carbon dioxide 

from the air, two alternating chemical reactions begin to form crystals 

composed of barium carbonate and silica. Their shapes evolve 

as the two reactions produce and consume acid, creating a complex 

landscape of changing pH as the two materials and neighboring 

structures “talk” to each other, or exchange acid. Researchers can 

influence this process through a series of bulk interventions, such 

as opening and closing the lid and altering the temperature or 

solution pH. (All images are courtesy of the authors.) 





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CO 2 

BaCO 3 

CO 2 + Ba 2 + + H 2 O BaCO 3 + 2H + 

SiO2 

2H + + SiO 3 

2– 

SiO 2 + H 2 O 

low pH 

pH SiO 2 

high pH 

The periodic table is itself a fascinating monument to the 

many dialogs that can happen just among the elements, so 

we started small, with a pair of chemical reactions in a covered 

beaker. The beaker contained a high-pH solution of sodium 

metasilicate (Na 2 SiO 3 ) and barium chloride (BaCl 2 ), with a flat 

piece of metal-coated glass inside for crystals to grow on (above 

left). When we opened the lid and let in carbon dioxide (CO 2 ) 

from the surrounding air, it reacted with barium ions and water 

and started growing barium carbonate (BaCO 3 ) crystals (above 

middle, top). The reaction also surrounds the crystals with a halo 

of acid formed by freed hydrogen ions, which slows the BaCO 3 

crystals’ growth but triggers silica (SiO 2 ) to deposit on them via 

a second reaction—which in turn consumes the acid and revives 

the first reaction (above middle, bottom). 

continued 

This reciprocal exchange was known to generate various curving 

shapes, but we envisioned that it would create a much more 

complex evolution of gradients and rates as acid diffuses within 

the emerging microscape. The deposition of each material from 

solution is tuned to pH, but in different ways (barium carbonate 

precipitates more with increasing pH, but silica prefers a specific 

range of pH, as shown in the graph above), and at the same time 

their growth changes the pH around them. A dialog of dialogs— 

local acid production and consumption, plus exchange between 

neighboring shapes—would turn the growing surface into a 

dynamic pH map, navigated at every point by adjusting the balance 

of reaction rates. Where SiO 2 forms, it blocks further growth; 

where the pH drops too low, both reactions fizzle out; everywhere 

else, the party would continue with an updated map. 

large CO 2 pulse 

For our first encounter, we provided steady CO 2 and 

discovered a forest of sticks growing in synchrony (above 

left). This scene was most telling for what we never saw: 

Sticks never grew toward one another, and they were 

never fatter or thinner than a standardized width. The 

first result suggested they were directing growth by talking 

amongst themselves—exchanging acid, speeding up 

silica production on their sides, leaving no choice but the 

express route up. The second suggested the work of an 

inner dialog—that BaCO 3 ’s and SiO 2 ’s requirement to be 

near each other, in order to clean up and replenish acid, 

sets strict limits on how wide they can grow. 

We took what we never saw as our cue. If we intervened 

and temporarily altered the balance, the feedback would 

kick in and restore order, potentially by finding a new form. 

So we “talked” by opening the lid wider than its usual crack 

and supplying a burst of CO 2 , which triggered a spurt of 

BaCO 3 growth at the top of each stick (above middle). We 

expected that rapidly widening the diameter would create 

a steep pH gradient across the top surface, with the center 

stranded far from the SiO 2 cleanup mechanism and building 

up acid faster than it could diffuse away. This picture 

matched what happened after we returned the lid to its 

original position: The tops stopped growing in the center 

and proceeded as rings, recovering regulation thickness all 

around the rim, with silica forming on the inner and outer 

surfaces (above right). They continued growing upward, 

but now each had to contend with acid from inside its own 

ring as well as from its neighbors, so the shape widened 

into a vase as it found its new balance. 

continued 




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We could also widen the shapes earlier 

on by growing them farther apart, and 

found that they not only responded similarly 

but produced a range of patterns depending 

on how nearby their neighbors were, 

from narrow vases in the suburbs to big corals 

full of wavy walls in the boonies (right, 

first and second images from top). The restored 

thickness was identical everywhere, 

indicating that the new growth fronts were 

just as fastidiously kept below the acid gradient 

threshold as the original. If we gave the 

growing vases even a small pulse of CO 2 , 

enough to introduce a ripple in their width, 

the feedback immediately slimmed them 

back all around as soon as we stopped. 

If we gave a pulse again, the vase rings 

slimmed themselves again, and we developed 

a rhythm, sculpting ridged patterns by 

subtly varying the length and time intervals 

of our interventions (far right, top image). 

Talking to a wall was more complicated. 

Giving corals the same small pulses uncovered 

a new set of dialogs, between 

the ends of each wall (nearly surrounded 

by SiO 2 and built for robust acid turnover) 

and the main length (with SiO 2 on only 

two sides). This distinction is usually subtle 

enough to keep the wall advancing 

as a united front, but even a small CO 2 

pulse can trigger a feedback cascade in 

which the rich get richer and the poor get 

poorer. The ends, better able to weather 

the acid from increased BaCO 3 production, 

kept growing upward, while the 

adjacent regions, burdened by extra acid 

from the faster-growing ends, grew even 

more slowly. Ultimately the maze of walls 

turned into a dense field of SiO 2 -coated 

spikes, and we grew a porcupine. Once 

transformed, the porcupine was amenable 

to rhythmic rippling with subsequent small 

pulses (far right, second image from top). 

Building new forms and patterns would 

no doubt introduce still more hidden dialogs, 

so we wanted a precise way to pick 

and choose, combine, and expand our 

range—we needed a volume knob. Temperature 

gave us a way to adjust both our 

talking and the system’s response threshold. 

Cooling preloads the solution with CO 2 

by increasing its solubility, and adjusting the 

temperature after that lets us modulate its 

delivery, from slowly over time to fast and 

concentrated. Cooling also slows down the 

reactions, giving acid more time to diffuse 

away without sharp gradients building up. 

This control allowed us to smoothly widen 

every feature of the landscape, irregular 

walls and all (below, second from bottom), 

giving us more freedom for direct sculpting. 

Turning up the temperature evoked a 

grand fireworks of multiple dialogs from 

even a simple ring—splitting it into concentric 

rings, suppressing the inner one, 

and breaking the outer one into a crown 

of spikes by amplifying even slight asymmetries 

in the acid fields (below, bottom). 

continued 

small pulses of CO 2 

decreasing 

temperature 

increasing 

temperature 





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replacing 

solution 

Time for a brief intermission. From flat glass we now 

had reactions dancing on a stage of ridges, peaks, valleys, 

and chasms—what alternate stories might play 

out if we could start a new act on this emerging stage? 

To change scenes, we ushered the actors out by replacing 

the solution, which cleared away the acid chatter 

and supplied reagents to start again (above). Now 

when we opened the lid and lowered the temperature, 

a rose blossomed on a cluster of leaves—free of 

checks and balances, it unfurled its own broad segments 

while suppressing growth around it (above 

right, and below). It almost always sprang from the 

leaf tops, where BaCO 3 had just been growing, but a 

bit of behind-the-curtain work revealed a world of unseen 

growth sites tucked away inside the crevices. If we 

ended the first scene by closing the lid, BaCO 3 growth 

slowed as CO 2 ran out, SiO 2 covered the tops as the last 

acid was produced, and all went quiet (opposite page, 

top). Upon reopening, stems took root deep in the 

nooks and crannies—finding the abandoned BaCO 3 

sites where acid buildup had stopped all growth when 

the structure split into walls or rings. 

continued 



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no 

CO 2 

Stems emerging from solitary caverns 

find themselves in situations unlike 

any they encountered when all 

arose in synchrony. The topography 

of a leaf cluster or coral shapes a 3D 

neighborhood, orienting them in all 

different directions free of any initial 

feedback (above). By providing a burst 

of CO 2 after they came out, we could 

now evoke rings of petals, shaped by 

the intricate acid patterns that arise 

when they all start talking (right, inset). 

A single stem in a vase, with 

neighbors only in other vases, is free to 

expand spontaneously when it comes 

out. By meeting it with a CO 2 pulse, we 

could synergize and grow a two-tiered 

flower (right). A lone stem coming 

out of a coral—both grown at a low 

density—brings its established axial 

symmetry to a boundless open space, 

enabling us to create a jellyfish with 

CO 2 pulses that successively build flaps, 

mouth, and tentacles (above right). 

continued 



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high pH 

low pH 

We discovered that structures-inprogress 

can even start growing on 

and inside each other: When we lowered 

the pH, the entire scene crossed 

“through the looking-glass” and 

neighbors started heading toward each 

other instead of away (left, top). They 

still made and navigated acid gradients 

as before, but superimposing the 

maps on a higher acid backdrop created 

an inverse steering situation. Now 

SiO 2 outpaced BaCO 3 on the outwardfacing 

sides but was completely inhibited 

on the interfacial side, letting BaCO 3 

grow there even with its reduced rate. 

This mechanism led neighbors to approach 

each other’s growth fronts, but 

rarely with exact aim. Curving was a 

delicate balance of inner and outer 

dialogs, with BaCO 3 tracking both 

acid-consuming SiO 2 and the neighbor’s 

SiO 2 -inhibiting acid. So rather 

than colliding head-on, the growth 

fronts almost always climbed and spiraled 

around each other before finally 

merging (left, inset). After that, their 

joint growth front continued winding 

and crawling, following its own echo 

over the surface. 

This twisting growth not only gave 

us a way to build elaborate sprawling 

architectures from multiple converging 

small ones, but also wove unique 

chemical surface patterns. As BaCO 3 

walks its fine line between burying 

itself and following SiO 2 , it can leave 

trails of abandoned sites wound in 

shallow grooves. When we replaced 

the solution and restored the original 

pH, now new forms could sprout not 

only from the tips but also—especially 

where tips had fused and become 

covered by SiO 2 —along the grooves. 

With successive pH shifts, we could 

braid a bed of twisted vines and stud 

them with blossoms (opposite page, 

top image), many unfolding around 

and harboring snails—or pattern a 

crustacean’s segments with curved 

paddles, tapered plates, and spines— 

their spacing and shaping precisely 

controlled by the pitch of the spiral 

grooves (opposite page, bottom). 

continued 




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low pH 

high pH 

The more we explore, the more the chemical 

dialog turns out to be beautiful in itself: 

We’re now modeling the coevolution of 

shapes and diffusion fields, examining how 

BaCO 3 and SiO 2 direct each other at the nanoscale, 

and seeing what changes if we use 

different elements and reactions. At the same 

time, fields and navigation come in many 

forms, some just beginning to be recognized, 

across all kinds of materials and systems. 

Chemical diffusion can interact with mechanical 

stress fields that are generated and relieved 

as forms grow. Reverse reactions or elasticity 

introduce local regions of disassembly into the 

map. Reactions and stress embedded in fully 

formed materials can even create, bend, and 

twist microshapes as environmental changes 

alter the fields. The micro-porcupines, sea 

monsters, and flowers show us that if we 

learn to participate in the mapmaking, the 

creation of microscale shapes and patterns becomes 

a process of continuously exploring yet 

never being lost. Ultimately, spires and chambers 

we create can become a playground for 

light, fluids, heat, current, vapor—the intricate 

architectures that make up every inch of us 

and the rest of life orchestrate the infinitely 

diverse ways in which we sense, respond to, 

and harvest energy from the environment. 

When it comes to designing future materials, 

discovering and participating in microscale dialogs 

may be the “disruptive” idea that helps 

us bring creativity and design to our evolving 

dialogs in the larger landscape. 

For relevant Web links, consult this issue 

of American Scientist Online: 







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The Road Ahead 

Designers envisioning the future have not always been able to foretell 

advances in automotive and motorway technology. 


Norman Bel Geddes was 

born in 1893 about 40 miles 

west of Detroit, center of 

the nascent automobile 

industry. The unusual surname—Bel 

Geddes—was devised when Norman 

Melancton Geddes and Helen Belle 

Schneider married, and the portmanteau 

surname symbolized the joining 

of two creative minds. From an early 

age, when his mother took him to the 

opera, Bel Geddes had been fascinated 

by the stage, and his early success as a 

set designer led to his career in theatrical 

work. Successively, the man whom 

the New York Times once described as 

“the Leonardo da Vinci of the 20th century” 

became an industrial designer, a 

popularizer of streamlining, and the 

creator of the 1939 New York World’s 

Fair General Motors “Highways and 

Horizons” exhibit known as “Futurama,” 

which he described as “a largescale 

model representing almost every 

type of terrain in America and illustrating 

how a motorway system may 

be laid down over the entire country.” 

Futurama was viewed by five million 

fairgoers, making it then “the 

most popular show of any Fair in history.” 

Visitors looked down upon the 

future from comfortable chairs that 

moved around the periphery of the 

model, which presented what the 

world of motorways might look like 

20 years hence. Among the visions on 

display was an automated highway 

system in which automobiles essentially 

drove themselves, something 

that is being realized today in the 

form of Google’s and others’ autonomous 

vehicles. Bel Geddes attributed 

Henry Petroski is the Aleksandar S. Vesic Professor 

of Civil Engineering and a professor of history 

at Duke University. This article is excerpted and 

adapted from The Road Taken: The History and 

Future of America’s Infrastructure with permission 

from Bloomsbury Press. 

the success of the exhibit to the fact 

that “the people who stood in line ride 

in motor cars and therefore are harassed 

by the daily task” of driving, 

and “Futurama gave them a dramatic 

and graphic solution to a problem 

which they all faced.” (The exhibit 

was so successful that General Motors 

produced an updated “Futurama II” 

for the 1964 New York World’s Fair.) 

Bel Geddes’ post-fair book, Magic 

Motorways, and the 1940 General Motors 

film To New Horizons contained 

numerous sanitized illustrations 

of not necessarily original concepts 

of what the future could look like. 

Prominent among them was a view 

of a “street intersection—city of tomorrow,” 

in which traffic appeared 

to be moving smoothly on one-way 

streets that were free of pedestrians, 

who were confined to elevated walkways 

or arcades highly reminiscent 

of those shown in a five-storied street 

concept proposed decades earlier, in 

a 1913 issue of Cassier’s Engineering 

Monthly. Bel Geddes’ book contained 

several versions of the elevated roadway 

concept, including one that added 

a raised deck above the crest of a 

power dam that already carried traffic 

across a river, as well as a double-deck 

bridge across a lake. 

Ironically, for all the futuristic intersections 

and magical motorways illustrated 

in Bel Geddes’ book, the vast 

majority of depictions of vehicles were 

of a distinctly late 1930s vintage. It was 

as if Bel Geddes had his eyes so intently 

focused on the road that, in spite 

of his teardrop-shaped streamlining 

concepts, he did not think much about 

how the car in which he was riding 

might look in 1960. Or perhaps that 

was to be the purview of General Motors 

designers. After all, GM might not 

have wanted to reveal to the public or 

to the competition what it imagined 

automobiles 20 years hence would look 

like, would it? These days, perhaps we 

can have a clearer view of what’s possible 

now and in at least the near future. 

Auto Pilot 

The future promises to bring us smart 

cars riding along smart highways and 

over smart bridges. Even if the drivers 

are not smart and nod off at the wheel, 

the futuristic vehicles they will be 

driving will find their way home the 

way a family horse did in olden days. 

As Robert Frost’s little horse of yesteryear, 

in his 1916 poem “The Road Not 

Taken,” thought it queer to be stopping 

by woods on a snowy evening, 

wondering if there were some mistake 

and giving its harness bells a shake in 

inquiry, so the automobile of tomorrow 

promises to question and warn us 

and even take control of matters when 

we try to do something foolish, such 

as approach at full speed a car stopped 

ahead; move into a passing lane when 

another vehicle is on our flank but not 

visible in the side-view mirror; drift 

across the lane or edge markings on 

the pavement; or drive past our exit. 

Such driving aids are already available 

today, and the vehicle equipped 

with them communicates with the 

driver through a combination of aural, 

visual, and haptic prompts. Drivers 

become conditioned to and react to 

different numbers and tones of beeps, 

blinking and flashing lights and icons, 

or vibrating steering wheels and seats 

after a surprisingly short period of acclimation. 

Some of the systems are so 

sophisticated that they act when the 

driver does not, steering the car back 

into its lane or stopping the car automatically 

in an emergency. Some 

cars can park themselves, and a fourwheel-drive 

Tesla equipped with an 

autopilot will perform automatic lane 

changing when the driver signals his 

intention to do so. And, of course, in 

just about any car now, when we miss 




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Artists work on a model designed by Norman Bel Geddes for the 1939 World’s Fair. This 

highly popular exhibit for General Motors included such motorway advances as an automated 

highway system, construction of which was envisioned to happen in the following 20 years. 

(Image courtesy of the The New York Public Library Manuscripts and Archives Division.) 

a turn, the GPS navigator we are using 

will inform us that it is recalculating 

our route or that we should make a legal 

U-turn as soon as conditions allow. 

Vehicles also are equipped with devices 

that can check the pressure in all 

four tires simultaneously and display 

on the now-ubiquitous center screen 

the results along with the correct inflation 

pressures. Sophisticated cruise 

control systems can not only maintain 

a steady speed but also can maintain 

a fixed number of safe car lengths 

between our vehicle and the one in 

front of us. This kind of smart control 

is achieved with such smoothness of 

deceleration that the driver having set 

the cruising speed at 65 miles per hour 

will realize that his speed has been reduced 

to 55 only when every other car 

on the highway is passing both him 

and the slowpoke in front of him. 

Even on the darkest evening of the 

year, the headlights of today’s cars 

brilliantly illuminate the dark and 

deep woods beside the road, some 

Drivers become 

conditioned to different 

beeps, lights, or 

vibrating prompts after 

a surprisingly short 

period of acclimation. 

dimming themselves as traffic coming 

in the opposite direction warrants. 

When we wish to pull off the highway 

and onto a dirt road leading up 

to a farmhouse, the headlight beams 

will shift from pointing straight ahead 

to pointing left or right, depending 

on which way we are turning. Smart 

windshield wipers know to start 

working when a few drops of water 

strike the glass, and they adjust the 

speed of their sweep according to how 

heavily it is raining. 

Experiencing such features in the 

cars of today, we might wonder what 

the future will bring. Will windshield 

wipers detect and clean off tree sap 

that streaks the glass? Will underinflated 

tires fill themselves even as we 

travel down the interstate? Will the 

illumination of the low-fuel warning 

icon trigger the GPS to identify the 

nearest service station selling our preferred 

brand of gasoline at the lowest 

local price and automatically direct us 

there? And if the distance to the pump 

is greater than the estimated miles 

of fuel left in the tank, will the car be 

slowed to the appropriate fuel-efficient 

speed to get us there before we run out 

of gas? These are the kinds of questions 

inventors and engineers pose to 





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On May 23, 2013, the bridge over the Skagit River in Washington State collapsed when 

an oversize vehicle hit parts of the bridge’s overhead trusses. The bridge, already old and 

stressed, could have been protected by sensors that detect a vehicle too high for the space. 

themselves on the way to improving 

present-day technology to make it future 

technology. 

Smart Bridges 

The features just described have more 

to do with vehicles than with the roads 

and bridges upon which they rely. Already 

it is commonplace to have detectors 

embedded in the pavement at 

A conceptual illustration of moving vehicles in traffic linked by wireless signals shows the 

hope that such connected-vehicle technology can help automobiles keep track of one another’s 

locations, thereby limiting accidents at danger spots such as busy intersections in urban areas 

or on highways with blind curves. (Image courtesy of the U.S. Department of Transportation.) 

Martha T/Wikimedia Commons 

intersections to tell traffic lights whether 

there is a vehicle waiting to make 

a left turn. If there is not, the left-turn 

arrow does not appear and traffic coming 

the other way is given the green 

light without delay. There are also 

smart open roads and bridges, pieces 

of smart infrastructure that in essence 

monitor themselves and alert engineers 

and others when they are in need of attention. 

A roadway can be embedded 

with sensors that detect snow and ice 

conditions, signaling when road crews 

should be dispatched. Bridges can be 

fitted not only with sensors but also 

with devices controlled by the sensors. 

Thus, when ice begins to develop on a 

bridge surface, the sensors that detect it 

can also trigger a system embedded in 

the curb or guardrail that sprays anti-icing 

solution over the pavement without 

human intervention. 

Another use of such technology is to 

fit a bridge with devices that can detect 

when a beam or girder in the structure 

has developed a serious crack or corrosion. 

It is expensive to wire a large 

number of such devices to a datacollection 

computer that can communicate 

with, say, the state department 

of transportation, but if the devices are 

wireless, the installation can be done 

much more easily and efficiently. 

One heavily used piece of infrastructure 

that would have benefited 

from detection devices is the Interstate 

495 bridge over the Christina River 

in Wilmington, Delaware. In mid- 

2014, human inspectors found that a 

number of the piers supporting the 

approach viaduct were out of plumb 

and that the structure was leaning. The 

section of highway was closed while 

the problem was evaluated and, eventually, 

corrected. The viaduct, which 

ran over largely vacant industrial land, 

had been damaged when a 50,000-ton 

pile of dirt was illegally placed atop 




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an area beside the bridge piers, causing 

the ground to shift and so damage 

the piers. Had they been fitted with 

sensitive wireless tilt meters akin to 

the kind that tell a smartphone or tablet 

which way is up, data indicating 

the abnormal condition might have 

been collected by a computer- and 

sensor-filled truck on a routine pass 

over the bridge. Earlier detection of the 

problem would likely have arrested 

the progressive damage and gotten the 

bridge back in service more quickly 

and at less expense. 

In another case, in 2013, a bridge carrying 

Interstate 5 over the Skagit River 

in Washington State collapsed and fell 

into the water after an oversize truck 

hit parts of the overhead steel structure 

while passing through one of its 

truss spans. The 58-year-old bridge had 

been considered functionally obsolete, 

forcing traffic in the righthand lane 

to drive very close to the side of the 

structure, where the overhead braces 

curved downward and so reduced vertical 

clearance. There had been a history 

of tall vehicles striking these structural 

parts, but the bridge had survived prior 

impacts. In addition to this problem, 

the Skagit River Bridge was also classified 

as fracture-critical, making it 

like the interstate bridge in Minneapolis 

that had collapsed six years earlier, 

claiming 13 lives. No one died in the 

Skagit River Bridge collapse, but that 

was only a matter of luck. 

Outfitting a bridge like the one over 

the Skagit River with sensors that 

detect a too-high oncoming vehicle 

would be easy to do. We already are familiar 

with devices that measure a vehicle’s 

speed by radar and display it on 

a sign beside the highway, thereby providing 

a warning to the driver to slow 

down. The augmented cruise control 

systems that keep a car a safe distance 

from the one in front of it use lasers 

and a computer to maintain a specified 

separation. Imagine a smart bridge 

with low clearance fitted with a similar 

device that could also communicate 

with an approaching tall but smart 

truck and slow it down to a stop before 

it impacted the bridge. That kind 

of wireless connection between bridge 

structure and vehicle could obviously 

prevent collapses and deaths. In time, 

it is likely to be a common reality. 

Engineers are currently working on 

highway-vehicle systems that maintain 

a constant wireless connection among 

vehicles within a few hundred yards of 

one another traveling along the same 

stretch of highway. In such a system, 

two cars not visible to each other— 

either because there is congested traffic 

between them or the one ahead is 

rounding a blind curve—would be 

able to maintain contact. If the leading 

car has to stop suddenly, it would send 

a signal to the following car to apply its 

brakes also—and do it automatically. 

Other so-called connected-vehicle 

technology could lead to the elimination 

of stop, yield, and other traffic 

signs. If all vehicles in the vicinity of 

an upcoming intersection were part 

of the wireless network, the computer 

in a car approaching the intersection 

could know whether there would be 

cross traffic. If so, the driver would be 

alerted to approach with caution or 

stop, and perhaps even have a bright 

electronic stop sign displayed on a 

navigation screen, if not as a hologram 

directly in the driver’s line of sight. 

If the intersection is anticipated to be 

clear, no warning would appear and 

the car would not even have to slow 

down. If all vehicles were part of such 

a system, traffic signs and lights could 

Promotional materials from General Motors show how its upcoming Cadillac V2V-equipped 

car will use a combination of sensing technologies to keep the vehicle centered in its lane 

without operator input, allowing for hands-free highway driving. (Images courtesy of GM.) 

be eliminated entirely, thereby unburdening 

a transportation department 

of the need to purchase, install, and 

maintain such things. Furthermore, a 

highway without physical signs would 

be a less visually cluttered and hence 

a less distracting and more attractive 

and environmentally friendly road. 

In the summer of 2014 the U.S. Department 

of Transportation announced 

its plan to require in the not-too-distant 

future the installation of vehicle-tovehicle 

communication technology 

in all cars and trucks, new and old. 

Fitting a vehicle with a transmitter is 

projected to add about $350 to the cost 

of a new car in 2020; an existing car 





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Urban planners want to use vehicles already out on the roads to get information about real-time 

conditions. An example of an app using such data donation is Street Bump, here shown in use in 

several metropolitan areas. (Images courtesy of New Urban Mechanics and the City of Boston.) 

could be retrofitted with an equivalent 

device. Engineering research teams 

connected with universities, government 

laboratories, and the automotive 

industry are already testing the 

technology. As part of a program at 

the Michigan Transportation Research 

Institute in Ann Arbor, volunteers 

are driving almost 3,000 transmitterequipped 

vehicles in actual traffic 

conditions. 

Mobile Data Donation 

Completely driverless cars are already 

a reality, though so far only as 

prototype vehicles. The development 

of such vehicles has been promoted 

for years by the U.S. Department of 

Defense, which through its Defense 

Advanced Research Projects Agency 

has for some years been sponsoring 

driverless-car challenges, offering prizes 

as high as $2 million for unmanned 

vehicles successfully negotiating urban 

and battlefield courses. Building 

on the successes of such programs, 

Google has been working on the development 

of driverless automobiles 

since 2009, and in the subsequent five 

years such vehicles drove themselves 

autonomously for more than 700,000 

miles on public roads. 

The automotive industry has also 

been actively developing its own autonomous 

technology. An Audi Q5 

outfitted with a computer system 

processing data from onboard instruments 

including cameras, radar, and 

laser sensors in early 2015 completed 

a 3,400-mile trip from San Francisco 

to New York City, during which it behaved 

as an autonomous vehicle and 

steered itself 99 percent of the time. It 

was only in very complicated traffic 

situations such as construction zones 

that a human driver had to take over 

the wheel. Tesla Motors had plans to 

offer its Model S electric-powered sedan 

in a self-steering version in the 

summer of 2015, and Elon Musk, chief 

executive officer of Tesla, promised 

a fully autonomous vehicle by about 

2020. General Motors is expected to introduce 

in 2017 technology in its Cadillac 

that will allow no-hands highway 

driving. The configuration of cars will 

naturally evolve with the use of such 

technology, and in time we can expect 

front seats to swivel around so that, if 

they wish, everyone in the vehicle can 

play card and board games, converse 

face-to-face, or catch up on email, send 

text messages, and otherwise immerse 

themselves in antisocial media. 

Even when a vehicle’s occupants 

do not have their eyes on the road, 




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A sample of self-healing concrete contains inclusions of encapsulated dormant bacteria and starch. 

When a crack breaks open the capsules and allows water in to activate the bacteria, they eat the 

starch and excrete calcium carbonate, which plugs the crack. (Photograph courtesy of TU Delft.) 

they can help inspect and maintain 

it by being “data donors.” This is a 

concept introduced by New Urban 

Mechanics, a group dedicated to “an 

approach to civic innovation focused 

on delivering transformative city services 

to residents.” In 2010, the Mayor’s 

Office of New Urban Mechanics 

was formed in Boston, later joined by 

an analogous city agency in Philadelphia, 

each serving as an “innovation 

incubator” by “building partnerships 

between internal agencies and outside 

entrepreneurs to pilot projects that address 

resident needs.” Specific projects 

ranged from improved trash cans to 

high-tech smartphone apps. 

Among the apps is Street Bump, 

which tracks an automobile’s ride over 

Boston streets. After the free app has 

been activated, the smartphone can be 

placed on a car’s dashboard to monitor 

the ride. The accelerometer in the 

phone detects bumps, and software 

distinguishes a bump due to hitting 

a pothole from one due to riding over 

a manhole or a speed bump. Where 

the vehicle does go over a pothole, 

the detected movement is paired via 

GPS with the location, and the data are 

sent—this is the data donation—to the 

appropriate city department that monitors 

the condition of the streets. When 

a pothole is identified, a road crew is 

sent to fill it. Engineers at Northeastern 

University have taken the concept 

a bit further with their Versatile Onboard 

Traffic Embedded Roaming Sensors, 

a mouthful no doubt forced to 

yield the acronym VOTERS. Vehicles 

driving a lot of city streets each day 

Cracks in a mix of 

asphalt concrete 

and short steel-wool 

fibers can be healed 

by subjecting the 

pavement material 

to microwaves. 

are outfitted with a variety of sensors 

that measure such things as tire sound, 

pavement surface defects, and subsurface 

delamination—data that when 

properly interpreted provide information 

on precursors to potholes. Suspect 

conditions can be monitored and repairs 

done when there are signs of a 

pothole beginning to form. 

Potholes themselves may be a thing 

of the past if researchers succeed in developing 

self-healing asphalt. One of 

the most prominent of these researchers 

is Erik Schlangen, a professor of 

civil engineering at Delft University 

of Technology in the Netherlands and 

leader of a group doing research in 

experimental micromechanics. By adding 

short steel-wool fibers into a mix of 

asphalt concrete, cracks that develop 

in the pavement material can be healed 

when it is subjected to microwaves. 

Schlangen has demonstrated the process 

in a six-and-one-half-minute TED 

talk, in which he breaks a small beam 

made of asphalt in two, places the two 

halves together in a microwave oven, 

and by the end of his talk removes a 

rejoined bar. His hope is to develop 

an industrial-scale microwave device 

that can be transported in a highway 

vehicle and perform the same kind of 

healing by induction. 

Self-healing concrete pavement 

made from Portland cement is also 

on the horizon. It can be made by incorporating 

into the concrete mix tiny 

capsules containing dormant bacteria 

capable of producing limestone when 

activated. This will happen when the 

concrete develops a crack that causes 

the encapsulated bacteria to be released 

and that allows water to reach 

the bacteria, thus enlivening them to 

do their work. Once activated, the bacteria 

consume a starchy substance that 

was incorporated into the concrete mix 

and excrete calcium carbonate, which 

is essentially limestone, thus plugging 

the crack and forestalling further damage. 

Structures formed of such concrete 

have recovered as much as 90 

percent of their uncracked strength. 

The roads of the future promise to 

be smooth and quiet, as will be the 

ride in all-electric vehicles that occupants 

will no doubt take for granted. 

The experience, however, may not be 

quite the same as Norman Bel Geddes 

laid out in the General Motors Futurama 

exhibit and in his book, Magic Motorways. 

It is likely to be far superior. 









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G. Evelyn Hutchinson’s 

Exultation in Natural History 

The ecologist most remembered for bringing experimental work to a largely 

observational field nevertheless loved and promoted organismal description. 

Laura J. Martin 

Natural history, the close observation 

of organisms in 

their environments, was 

once the central component 

of biological education. Natural historians 

went into the field to study organisms’ 

distributions, behaviors, interactions, 

and life histories. But today it is 

easy to earn a degree in biology without 

setting foot outside. Few universities 

offer courses on species identification, 

and biological research collections are 

struggling to maintain funding. Even in 

ecology, a subdiscipline of biology that 

emerged from natural history studies, 

researchers are more likely to specialize 

in an empirical method or theoretical 

question than in what lives around us. 

As a result, most people—even trained 

ecologists—can distinguish between 

the logos of Honda and Hyundai more 

readily than they can the leaves of red 

and silver maples. Meanwhile, species 

continue to disappear from the Earth in 

what some contend is the planet’s sixth 

major extinction event. 

For some ecologists, their discipline’s 

turn away from natural history 

is troubling, and they have begun to 

defend descriptive, observational, and 

organism-based studies. Joshua Tewksbury, 

for example, an ecologist at the 

University of Washington, has written 

about the ways in which knowledge of 

natural history informs medicine, food 

security, biodiversity conservation, and 

ecological forecasting. Others have developed 

digital tools, including field 

guide apps and data repositories, that 

aim to make natural history accessible 

Laura J. Martin is an evolutionary ecologist and 

an environmental historian. A fellow at the Harvard 

University Center for the Environment, she 

is currently writing a history of ecological restoration. 

E-mail: ________________ 

lauramartin@fas.harvard.edu 

to the public and to increase access to 

data gathered by the public. For example, 

through eBird (a real-time online 

checklist program), the Cornell Lab of 

Ornithology and the National Audubon 

Society have made it possible for 

tens of thousands of bird watchers to 

collect and store their observations in 

a unified database. Another initiative, 

the National Science Foundation’s Collections 

in Support of Biological Research 

Program, aims to make natural 

history more appealing to students and 

funding agencies. 

Most people—even 

trained ecologists— 

can distinguish the 

logos of Honda 

and Hyundai more 

readily than they 

can the leaves of red 

and silver maples. 

As we reimagine natural history’s 

relationship to ecology, it’s worth revisiting 

the work of one of the most influential 

ecologists in the field’s history, 

G. Evelyn Hutchinson (1903–1991), 

who is credited with shifting ecology’s 

focus from the individual organism to 

the abstracted ecosystem. Hutchinson 

is renowned in scientific circles for establishing 

the sciences of limnology 

(the study of inland waters), population 

biology, and ecosystem ecology, 

but at heart he was motivated more 

by the beauty of other species than by 

disciplinary boundaries. 

American Scientist has a special 

relationship with Hutchinson and his 

passions. He explored his love of natural 

beauty in Marginalia, a column he 

wrote regularly for this magazine from 

1943 to 1955. After World War II, researchers 

in the United States, including 

Hutchinson, questioned the role 

of science in society, and specifically 

whether scientists were responsible 

for the wartime applications of their 

research. Many concluded that science 

and politics were separate spheres, 

and that scientists should remain detached 

from their objects of study. 

Hutchinson took a radically different 

position, preferring to view science as 

a mode of illuminating beauty, even as 

“a technology of love.” 

Formative Years 

Hutchinson, now celebrated for his 

work on abstractions such as ecosystems 

and niches, built his career on 

deep observation and description of 

tiny creatures. Hutchinson took to natural 

history early in life. He was born 

in Cambridge, England, in 1903 to an 

academic family. His father, Arthur, 

was a mineralogist at Cambridge University, 

and his mother, Evaline, was 

a suffragist and author of the controversial 

1936 book Creative Sex. Growing 

up, Hutchinson went on frequent 

fossil-hunting trips with his parents. 

As a teenager, he spent afternoons in 

the Cambridge Zoological Museum 

with his uncle Arthur Shipley, who 

studied invertebrate morphology, or 

with friends at the Cambridge Botanical 

Garden, with whom he collected 

tadpoles and water beetles. He carried 

these interests into high school, publishing 

his first scientific paper at age 

15, on a species of swimming grasshopper. 

By 1922, in his second year at 




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1. Bryocamptus (Bryocamptus) hutchinsoni 

2. Cyclops hutchinsoni 

3. Eocyzicus hutchinsoni 

4. Gomphonema olivaciodes 

var. hutchinsoniana 

5. Halmopota hutchinsoni 

6. Hutchinsoniella macracantha 

7. Isobactrus hutchinsoni 

8. Lophocharis hutchinsoni 

9. Moina hutchinsoni 

10. Entomobrya hutchinsoni 

11. Neoechinorhynchus hutchinsoni 

12. Hydrachna hutchinsoni 

13. Japyx hutchinsoni 

14. Cinygmula hutchinsoni 

15. Limnesia hutchinsoni 

16. Tropodiaptomus hutchinsoni 

not pictured 

Apataniana hutchisoni 

Trihothyas hutchinsoni 

Machilanus hutchinsoni 

Protziella hutchinsoni 

Anisocampa hutchinsoni 

5. 

14. 

13. 

10. 

2. 

8. 

15. 

4. 

11. 

15. 

16. 

12. 

9. 

6. 

1. 

7. 

3. 

As a testament to G. Evelyn Hutchinson’s love of and foundation in natural history, many 

recognized species across a variety of taxa are named after him to honor his contributions to 

ecology. (Organisms are not drawn to scale.) 

Emmanuel College of Cambridge University, 

Hutchinson became a fellow of 

the British Entomological Society. 

While at Emmanuel College, 

Hutchinson discovered the new field 

of biochemistry through physiologist 

J. B. S. Haldane, who studied salt metabolism 

(and who is now known for 

his mathematical theory of natural selection). 

After graduating with a bachelor’s 

degree from the zoology program, 

Hutchinson pursued his interest 

in biochemistry at the famous Stazione 

Zoologica in Naples, Italy. From there 

he accepted a biology lectureship at 

the University of Witwatersrand in 

Johannesburg, South Africa. His partner, 

Grace Pickford, a fellow zoology 

student from Cambridge, joined 

him there. Together, Hutchinson and 

Pickford collected invertebrates from 

coastal lakes near Cape Town in order 

to determine whether there was 

a relationship between the number of 

invertebrate species in a lake and its 

water chemistry. Through this project, 

Hutchinson first combined his interests 

in entomology and biochemistry. 

From Witwatersrand, Hutchinson 

applied for a graduate fellowship to 

work with embryologist Ross Granville 

Harrison at Yale University. Although 

the fellowship was spoken for, 

Harrison offered him an instructor position 

in the Osborne Zoological Laboratory. 

Hutchinson quickly accepted. 

Once in New Haven, he was tasked 

with teaching freshwater biology. Pickford, 

meanwhile, worked on her PhD 

and joined the Bingham Oceanographic 

Laboratory at Yale in 1931, where 

she pursued foundational work in 

comparative endocrinology. The chair 

of the zoology department selected 

Hutchinson as lead biologist for the 





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Yale North India Expedition 

in 1932. Hutchinson’s 

experience sampling lakes 

in Goa and Ladakh served 

as the basis of his first 

book, The Clear Mirror, 

published in 1936, laying 

the groundwork for his 

later contributions to limnology. 

This experience 

also secured him a permanent 

position at Yale. To 

the chagrin of some of his 

colleagues, Hutchinson, 

who lacked a PhD, was 

offered a professorship 

upon his return. 

Career at Yale 

Hutchinson was interested 

in making broad 

generalizations about the 

structure of the natural 

world, but he was also 

drawn to classical field 

observations of organisms 

in their habitats. At 

the beginning of his career, 

the disciplines that came 

to constitute limnology 

were taught separately 

as hydrobiology, physiology, 

zoology, chemistry, 

and geology. Hutchinson 

wanted to bridge these 

fields to study the adaptations 

of invertebrates to 

different chemical conditions 

in lakes. During the 

1930s, Hutchinson and a 

handful of graduate students 

began to study biogeochemical 

cycling, the progression 

of nutrients through an ecosystem. Up 

until this point, biologists had studied 

the circulation of elements such as 

carbon and nitrogen within individual 

organisms’ bodies, but not among them. 

Work on biogeochemical cycling 

intersected with America’s wartime 

efforts in an unpredictable way. In 

1939, Yale constructed a cyclotron, a 

type of particle accelerator that enabled 

physicists to produce radioactive 

isotopes and, a few years later at 

other labs, an atomic bomb. With this 

new technology at his institution, 

Hutchinson suggested that radioactive 

phosphorus and nitrogen could 

be used to “explore the metabolism 

of the plankton community.” For 

years Hutchinson had puzzled 

over his observation that lakes 

By the time he was a teenager, Hutchinson was a knowledgeable 

natural historian. His parents took him on frequent fossil-hunting 

trips, and he spent his afternoons at the Cambridge Zoological Museum 

or the Cambridge Botanical Garden. (Photograph courtesy of 

G. Evelyn Hutchinson Papers (MS 649). Manuscripts and Archives, 

Yale University Library.) 

often experienced several blooms 

of plankton per summer. It seemed 

to him that the early blooms should 

have depleted all of the available 

phosphorus in the water, making 

later blooms impossible. In 1941, 

Hutchinson was able to secure a small 

amount of radioactive phosphorus- 32, 

which he and his graduate student W. 

T. Edmondson took out in “a small 

rowboat with a hand-powered winch” 

and dumped into Linsley Pond, a kettle 

pond near campus. This was the first 

time that scientists intentionally added 

radioisotopes to the environment. 

Hutchinson and Edmondson’s initial 

results were promising: They were able 

to detect radioactivity in later water 

samples in a pattern consistent with 

algae taking up available phosphorus 

and then falling to bottom of the lake. 

This session was the 

beginning of experimental 

ecosystem ecology, 

although it would 

be another three decades 

before ecosystem became 

a household term. 

At Yale, Hutchinson 

mentored dozens of 

students. Many of these 

individuals went on to 

be influential in multiple 

disciplines, including 

Edward Deevey (1914– 

1988; paleoecology), 

Robert MacArthur 

(1930–1972; population 

biology), and Donna 

Haraway (1944–; science 

and technology studies). 

As Nancy Slack relates 

in G. Evelyn Hutchinson 

and the Invention of Modern 

Ecology, Hutchinson 

was an admired, if 

eccentric, teacher. One 

former student, Gordon 

Riley, explained: 

Evelyn lived in that 

magnificent, wellordered 

mind, which 

was a good place for 

him to be, for he was 

surrounded by chaos. 

His clothes were 

shabby, his car decrepit. 

Every surface 

in his office was piled 

high with books and 

papers, although he 

could instantly locate 

anything he wanted. His performance 

in the lab was a disaster, 

frequently accompanied by crashes 

of glassware and a fervent… 

broad English—“Oh Blahst.” 

Not all students got along easily with 

Hutchinson. When Howard (“H. T.” or 

“Tom”) Odum (1924–2002; ecosystem 

ecology) began his PhD at Yale in 1948, 

he wrote a letter to his brother, Eugene 

(1913–2002; ecosystem ecology): 

I became aware last year of 

[Hutchinson’s] real method and 

habits of dealing with students. 

It is typical of the Yale Profs and 

most uncomplimentary. They are 

exceedingly cut throat as far as 

any aid they will give students. 

They will help as long as they can 




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figure an angle for themselves…. 

Hutchinson is hard to work for 

because of his disorganization 

and artistic moody temperament. 

He is always implying or angling 

rather than speaking directly. 

Hutchinson had been at Yale for 14 

years when an editor of American Scientist, 

George Baitsell, asked him to review 

recent publications that would be 

“of interest to workers in more than one 

branch of science.” It was 1943, and the 

United States had recently sent forces 

to the war in Europe. Unbeknownst 

to the American public, the federal 

government was working to develop 

an atomic weapon, the first of which 

Rather than focus 

on the military 

or commercial 

applications of 

science, Hutchinson 

portrayed science 

as a practice of 

exultation. 

would be detonated in New Mexico 

in 1945. Hutchinson’s readers would 

have caught his first, oblique reference 

to war in his July 1943 column: 

The writer believes that the most 

practical lasting benefit science 

can now offer is to teach man 

how to avoid destruction of his 

own environment, and how, by 

understanding himself with true 

humility and pride, to find ways 

to avoid injuries that at present 

he inflicts on himself with such 

devastating energy. 

In his first few Marginalia columns, 

Hutchinson stuck close to his interest 

in biochemistry, summarizing papers 

on topics that included the structure of 

blood proteins, the uptake of magnesium 

by bacteria, and the regulation of 

metabolism by the thalamus. But soon 

he began to cover other disciplines, 

including geology, archeology, and astronomy, 

always through the lens of 

the organism. Some of the connections 

he drew between the macroscale and 

the microscale were tenuous and unconvincing. 

Others were profound. 

Hutchinson, shown here at age 17 collecting the froghopper Philaenus spumarius, published 

a study on the species the following year (in 1921). Hutchinson had begun describing 

species and publishing papers in scientific journals at age 15. (Photograph courtesy of G. 

Evelyn Hutchinson Papers (MS 649). Manuscripts and Archives, Yale University Library.) 

Hutchinson’s Marginalia 

After the United States dropped atomic 

bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima 

and Nagasaki, Hutchinson, 

along with many other scientists, began 

publicly debating the relationship 

between scientific research and national 

health, defense, and the economy. In 

his October 1945 column, Hutchinson 

reviewed “Science, the Endless Frontier,” 

which he called “one of the most 

important documents ever prepared 

on the relation of science to society.” 

The report, produced by Vannevar 

Bush, director of the wartime Office 

of Scientific Research and Development, 

recommended that the federal 

government expand support for research 

(and led to the establishment 

of the National Science Foundation in 

1950). Bush’s report both responded to 

and sparked questions about the shape 

of postwar science. How responsible 

were scientists for the applications 

of their research? How independent 

should scientific research be? 

Rather than focus on the military 

or commercial applications of science, 





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Hutchinson portrayed science as a 

practice of exultation: 

If photosynthesis, gravitation, 

oxidation-reduction, the internal 

constitution of planets, the dark 

companion of Sirius, the extragalactic 

nebular red shift, transfinite 

numbers, the logic of classes, 

mediaeval polyphony, Mozart, 

Byzantine mosaics, the paintings 

of Ryder and Juan Gris, Vergil, John 

Donne, T. S. Eliot, and the whole 

multifarious crowd of like things 

are not the concern of the citizen 

and of civilization, then he is at best 

but a precitizen in a precivilization. 

At a time when 

many Americans 

were embracing 

the idea that 

scientists should 

be dispassionate 

observers, 

Hutchinson urged 

the opposite. 

After the publication of Bush’s report, 

Hutchinson began to use his 

Marginalia columns to explore the connections 

among scientific curiosity, art, 

and society. He described sea slugs as 

“among the most brilliant and curiously 

decorative marine organisms, 

which seem as though they could easily 

glide in and out of a Japanese print.” 

In 1954, he wrote that “no animals that 

have ever lived seem to have balanced 

more precariously on the boundaries 

of the real and the imaginary” than 

the extinct dodo. Hutchinson’s topics 

included faked fossils, ancestry 

of humans, the outermost regions of 

the atmosphere, bird behavior, flying 

saucers, Renaissance art, and metallurgy. 

At a time when many Americans 

were embracing the idea that scientists 

should be dispassionate observers 

removed from society, Hutchinson 

urged the opposite. 

Over time, what began as marginalia 

became the core of some of 

Hutchinson’s greatest research accomplishments. 

More than three decades 

before he popularized the idea of life 

Hutchinson, pictured here in his laboratory in 1939 at age 36, never earned a PhD. Nevertheless, 

his talents were recognized early, and he spent his career as a professor at 

Yale University. His research there set the foundations for the fields of limnology and 

ecosystem science, and he mentored some of the most influential names in 20th-century 

ecology. (Photograph courtesy of G. Evelyn Hutchinson Papers (MS 649). Manuscripts and 

Archives, Yale University Library.) 

cycles in An Introduction to Population 

Ecology, Hutchinson wrote a column 

about the cyclicality of human history. 

In a 1947 Marginalia column, he noted 

the promise of physicist Willard Libby’s 

work on atmospheric carbon-14. 

A decade later, Hutchinson collaborated 

with Edward Deevey and Paul 

Sears to establish radiocarbon dating 

as the central tool of paleoecology. 

Thus, Hutchinson’s musings in Marginalia 

ultimately shaped some of the 

most influential concepts in 20th- and 

21st-century ecology. 

One such concept was the idea 

that the natural world is structured 

into ecosystems. Today ecosystems appear 

in high-school textbooks and car 

advertisements, and they justify 171 

sections of U.S. federal environmental 

law. Sixty years ago, this was not 

the case. Hutchinson’s broad interests 

led to an invitation to the Macy conferences, 

a series of interdisciplinary 

meetings from 1946 to 1953 on “Circular 

Causal and Feedback Mechanisms 

in Biological and Social Systems.” The 

Macy conferences advanced the perspective 

that complex systems could 

be treated as self-regulating feedback 

systems. In a 1949 review in Marginalia 

of Cybernetics, a book by a fellow 

conference participant, Norbert 

Wiener, Hutchinson noted that “the 

language of the radio engineer and the 

physiologist approach each other.” Increasingly 

in his own work, Hutchinson 

strove to describe living and non- 




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living processes—the physiological 

and demographic, the chemical and 

physical—in the same models. This 

work influenced many of Hutchinson’s 

students, including H. T. Odum, 

who would make ecosystem science 

central to ecology. 

In his final planned column in 

January 1955, Hutchinson wrote that 

“the enormous prestige of applied science” 

had “led to a continued and 

growing neglect of the significance of 

science as a method of illumination.” 

He dedicated his column to French 

theologian and philosopher Simone 

Weil, who, by his account, “rejected 

completely the social significance 

of science as it is commonly understood” 

and is today recognized for 

her unconventional criticism of 20thcentury 

scientists’ focus on methods 

over love of nature: 

Her whole life was an intense and 

desperate exploration of a psychological 

wilderness of affliction, 

and from this wilderness she 

cried stridently that we should 

take in the entire universe in an 

act of intellectual love extending 

infinitely far into the future and 

past and excluding nothing but 

our momentary sins. It was as a 

part of this act that she conceived 

science, and for that reason this 

coda to Marginalia… is dedicated 

to her memory. 

Exultation and Explanation 

Reviewing Hutchinson’s autobiography 

in 1979, evolutionary biologist 

Stephen Jay Gould described 

Hutchinson’s career as a unique example 

of both exultation and explanation: 

Since Gould published his review, 

ecology has veered toward explanation 

at the expense of exultation, and today 

Hutchinson is most often remembered 

for having turned ecology into a science 

of abstractions. If we look closely 

at his writing, though, it nearly always 

centered on the concrete details of organismal 

life. Consider, for example, 

Hutchinson’s famous contribution to 

the idea of the niche. Prior to Hutchinson, 

ecologists had thought of the niche 

as either an organism’s address or its 

profession—as either the environmental 

space a species occupied, or the activities 

such as nesting that a species 

performed in its own unique way. An 

arctic fox, for example, might be said to 

occupy an “arctic niche” or a “carrionfeeder 

niche.” Hutchinson revolutionized 

these ideas by making the niche 

an attribute of a species. 

According to Hutchinson’s formulation, 

each species had its own 

niche and only one, which could be 

described by the environmental conditions 

and resources a species needs 

to survive. Through this imagining, 

Hutchinson hoped to distinguish the 

effects of evolutionary changes in 

organisms (or changes to the “niche 

space”) from those of competition 

among species and other environmental 

changes. Hutchinson’s niche concept 

now forms the core of species distribution 

modeling, in which modelers 

predict where a species was found in 

the past or where one might be found 

in the present or future. To Hutchinson, 

organisms were always at the center, 

never at the margin. Generalizations 

were a means to understanding 

the individual’s natural history, not the 

other way around. 

Ecologists calling for a revitalization 

of natural history have focused on institutional 

and technical solutions, arguing 

for the establishment of new professional 

societies and for engagement 

with emerging methods in genomics, 

computation, and environmental monitoring. 

But embedded in this argument 

is a deeper question about how scientists 

should relate to their objects of 

study. For decades, we have imagined 

the ideal scientist to be detached and 

impassionate. We have imagined that 

science and art lie at opposite ends of a 

spectrum. Perhaps to revitalize natural 

history it will be necessary to imagine a 

different way of doing science. 

In his last column for American Scientist, 

titled “What is Science For?,” 

Hutchinson wrote that it was “useless 

to complain passively that the destructive 

tendencies are human nature,” 

and he maintained that “the most 

pressing need for mankind is to learn 

to produce a technology of love.” Love 

of the natural world—both human and 

nonhuman—compels many scientists 

to do what they do. In his pursuit of 

answers to big questions, Hutchinson 

remained in awe of the detailed, mysterious 

lives of other species. 





Ecologists must live in tension 

between two approaches to the 

diversity of life. On the one hand, 

they are tempted to bask in the 

irreducibility and glory of it all— 

exult and record. But, on the other, 

they acknowledge that science 

is a search for repeated pattern. 

Laws and regularities underlie 

the display…. 

Many ecologists have escaped 

this tension by focusing their 

work on a single approach— 

exultation or explanation—and 

by treating the other side with territorial 

suspicion and derogation. 

Hutchinson has practiced and 

loved both all his life. 

“I didn’t know Kernan was on sabbatical.” 





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Scientists’ 

 

The Scientists’ Nightstand, 

American Scientist’s book 

review section, offers brief 

reviews and other booksrelated 

content. Please see also 

our Scientists’ Nightstand 

e-newsletter, which notes books 

coverage and news from the 

world of science publishing: 

http://amsci.org/nightstand-news 

ALSO IN THIS ISSUE 

A IS FOR ARSENIC: The Poisons 

of Agatha Christie. By Kathryn 

Harkup. 

page 251 

SILENT SPARKS: The Wondrous 

World of Fireflies. By Sara 

Lewis. 

page 252 

Male Photinus, the “lightning bug” 

firefly genera. From Silent Sparks; 

photo by Terry Priest. 

Poetry for the 

Apocalypse 

THE XENOTEXT: Book 1. Christian Bök. 

200 pp. Coach House, 2015. $19.95. 

Oh! why hath not the mind 

Some element to stamp her image on 

In nature somewhat nearer to her own? 

Why, gifted with such powers to send abroad 

Her spirit, must it lodge in shrines so frail? 

—William Wordsworth, The Prelude 

Affectionately nicknamed 

“Conan the Bacterium,” 

Deinococcus radiodurans, a socalled 

polyextremophile, has an uncanny 

ability to rapidly repair damage 

to its genome. As a result, it can 

resist the most hostile conditions, from 

drought to radiation to acid baths to a 

Martian atmosphere. And if Canadian 

conceptual poet Christian Bök has his 

way, it will compose verse that will 

outlive our Sun. 

Bök has earned a reputation for 

conducting extremely difficult poetic 

experiments and executing them 

with technical wizardry. In his awardwinning 

2001 bestseller Eunoia, for example, 

he uses only a single vowel in 

each chapter, a constraint that produces 

a form known as a univocalic. The 

first section is composed of words that 

include no vowels other than a, the 

second includes no vowels other than 

e, and so on. To build an appropriate 

lexicon for this demanding work, Bök 

read through Webster’s Third International 

Unabridged Dictionary five times 

and spent six years writing. His latest 

poetic challenge takes him into trickier 

and more technically specialized territory. 

Taking on the very perishability 

of text, Bök has devised a novel solution: 

In composing his verse, he is 

employing the medium of life itself. 

The Xenotext: Book 1 represents the 

first phase of Bök’s wildly ambitious 

project—nearly 15 years in the making 

and still ongoing—of encoding poetry 

into the genome of the bacterium D. 

radiodurans. Using a substitution cipher, 

Bök “translates” his poetry into what 

he calls a “chemical alphabet” representing 

a genetic sequence. After simulating 

the resulting protein’s folding 

pattern, which is essential for its functioning, 

Bök sends his specifications 

to a biotechnical lab that engineers the 

gene accordingly. Finally, Bök’s team of 

biologists transplants a plasmid carrying 

the gene into the bacterium. 

But why introduce such complexity 

into the process of poetic composition? 

The Xenotext provocatively wagers 

that—in the face of global catastrophe, 

whether in the form of ecological collapse, 

drug-resistant pandemic, or nuclear 

war—D. radiodurans can preserve 

at least a bit of humanity’s poetic heritage 

after the apocalypse. DNA, with its 

remarkable storage capacity and stability, 

is perhaps the “natural element,” the 

worthy vessel for the mind’s substance 

that Wordsworth expresses longing for 

in the epigraph above. 

It is a felicitous coincidence that Bök, 

born “Christian Book,” is so radically 

rethinking the media format that his 

surname evokes. In a 2007 interview 

with the journal Postmodern Culture, he 

expressed an explicit desire “to extend 

poetry…beyond the formal limits of 

the book,” to have his writing “burgeon 

into the world, like a horrible parasite, 

exfoliating beyond itself, evolving along 

its own trajectory.” Indeed, besides 

imagining D. radiodurans to be a resilient 

linguistic ark, Bök has conceived of the 

bacterium as a living, versifying respondent 

to his “parasitical” poem. 

“The Xenotext,” he explains in the 

book’s afterword, “consists of a single 

sonnet (called ‘Orpheus’), which, 

when translated into a gene and then 

integrated into a cell, causes the cell 

to ‘read’ this poem, interpreting it as 

an instruction for building a viable, 

benign protein—one whose sequence 

of amino acids encodes yet another 

sonnet (called ‘Eurydice.’)” Bök uses 

the term translate here in an extended 

sense, which makes us realize the 




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many different levels of encoding and 

translation necessary for the success 

of his project. To “translate” his original 

poem (in the sense of encoding it 

into a gene), Bök first needs to assign 

a letter of the alphabet to each of 26 codons, 

the nucleotide triplets that form 

the basic units of genetic code. He then 

writes a sonnet and strings together a 

transplantable segment of DNA that 

corresponds to the poem letter by letter. 

Ultimately, the creation of the benign 

protein depends on RNA transcription 

and ribosomal translation, just as the 

legibility of “Eurydice” depends on a 

cipher that makes “Orpheus” and “Eurydice” 

mutually transposable. 

The Xenotext: Book 1 doesn’t explain 

the mechanics of these steps in detail— 

likely such information will be forthcoming 

in Book 2—but Bök has given 

us tantalizing previews of the process in 

other venues. In a 2011 interview with 

the Montreal-based magazine Maisonneuve, 

he says, “Because there exists a 

codependent, biochemical relationship 

between any preliminary DNA sequence 

and its resulting RNA sequence 

(which creates the string of amino acids 

in the protein), my two poems must 

likewise be bijectively codependent for 

my project to work.” He adds, “No poet 

in the history of poetics has ever actually 

imagined creating two texts that mutually 

encipher each other in this way.” 

Bök’s allusion to the Greek myth is 

apt, showing his commitment to relating 

novelty to tradition. His ongoing 

experiment summons the plight 

of Orpheus, the virtuosic singer who 

attempts to bring his dead wife, Eurydice, 

back from the underworld. Orpheus 

fails, for all his efforts, while 

on the very brink of success. For the 

French writer and literary theorist 

Maurice Blanchot, “Eurydice is the 

limit of what art can attain.” 

The question remains: Can Bök, a 

virtuosic poet in his own right, surmount 

the limit of death and achieve 

true literary immortality? Thus far, 

he has been successful in provoking 

Escherichia coli (which Bök used for 

his initial tests, as it’s simpler and less 

expensive to engineer) to respond to 

his implanted verse. He reports that 

his poem “Orpheus,” which begins 

“any style of life/is prim,” causes the 

bacterium to respond by producing 

another poem, “Eurydice,” which begins 

“the faery is rosy/of glow.” 

This promising development with 

E. coli yielded proof of concept, but 

working with D. radiodurans has 

proved to be much more challenging. 

When interviewed for a 2015 article 

in the Calgary Herald, Bök said, “The 

extremophile is more difficult to engineer 

and the protein that is produced 

is not fully expressed. It’s either destroying 

it too quickly for us to characterize 

it, or it’s censoring it during its 

production. We can’t really tell, but it’s 

not making the entire protein stably. 

So you can’t read the poem.” Thus, for 

the moment, Eurydice is silent. 

We will have to wait for Book 2 of 

The Xenotext to ascertain Eurydice’s 

eventual fate—whether she will be unearthed 

by Bök’s orphic attempt or remain 

shrouded in Hades’ impenetrable 

shadows. In the meantime, Book 1 is, 

in Bök’s words, “an ‘infernal grimoire,’ 

introducing readers to the concepts for 

this experiment.” A heterogeneous set 

of spin-off poems tangentially related, 

in theme and technique, to The Xenotext 

proper, The Xenotext: Book 1 is what 

Bök calls a “movie trailer for the second 

book,” which will more directly document 

his experiments with “Orpheus” 

and “Eurydice.” 

Can Bök, a virtuosic 

poet in his own right, 

surmount the limit of 

death and achieve true 

literary immortality? 

Although some readers may be 

disappointed that Book 1 does not 

chronicle the successful insertion of 

“Orpheus” into D. radiodurans, The 

Xenotext: Book 1 is nonetheless a volume 

displaying staggering talent and 

genuine interdisciplinary imagination. 

It is at once rigorously scientific and 

rigorously literary. As Bök dynamically 

reflects on “biogenesis and extinction,” 

poetic knowledge and scientific awareness 

intertwine as if in a double helix. If 

The Xenotext proper—that is, the actual 

poem embedded in the bacterium—is 

a text intended to be recovered by intelligent 

life long after our planet and 

civilization have collapsed, then The 

Xenotext: Book 1 is a kind of introductory 

sourcebook allowing human readers 

to at least appreciate its concept in 

the here and now. 

The Xenotext: Book 1 consists of a series 

of poetic suites, each expressing a 

tighter relationship with science and 

a greater degree of formal innovation 

than its predecessor. In the tradition of 

French experimental poetry, including 

that of the Oulipo, a neovanguard 

group dedicated to exploring both 

mathematical and nonmathematical 

constraints, The Xenotext: Book 1 presents 

a cornucopia of literary structures, 

from the prose poem to the sonnet to 

the computer-generated visual poem. 

The opening section, “The Late 

Heavy Bombardment,” is a prose 

poem beginning with a depiction of 

the hell on Earth of the Hadean period, 

the geologic eon during which 

our highly volcanic planet endured 

numerous meteoric impacts, setting 

the stage—somehow—for the formation 

of life. In a series of rhetorical 

questions, Bök demonstrates both 

a manic verve for metaphor making 

and a methodical penchant for parallel 

structures: 

What dire seed must these onslaughts 

have scattered, like 

shrapnel, across your cremated 

badlands? What prion? What virus? 

What breed of spore must 

have emerged, like a spear point 

or a sword blade, from these early 

ovens of Auschwitz (each cyanide 

bonfire, burning in reverse, spitting 

forth a fitful embryo, cloned 

from the smoke and the dross)? 

Later in the section, Bök imagines a 

future cataclysmic scenario, a perfect 

test environment for his hypothetical 

Xenotext to survive: “What Great 

Comet has yet to plummet from the 

heavens, like a rocket engine dousing 

its jets during splashdown in your 

oceans of nitroglycerine?” 

The next section, “Colony Collapse 

Disorder,” is a translation of Book 4 

of Virgil’s Georgics, a four-book poem 

about agriculture, completed around 

29 or 28 bce, into 50 fast-moving unrhymed 

sonnets. Book 4 is, famously, an 

account of beekeeping, complete with 

practical instructions (“Contrive that 

the ingress to the sanctum/of the bees 

be narrow, made from woven/osiers 

or cedar braids”). It also enfolds a story 

within a story, recounting the myth in 

which Aristæus, a pastoral god, loses 

his bees and has to coerce the shapeshifting 

Proteus into divulging the 

cause of his apiary’s collapse. Proteus 

relates the tragic tale of Orpheus and 

Eurydice, explaining that Eurydice’s 


For more about how Bök composed the Xenotext sonnets, go to bit.ly/25J9Mee. ________ 




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© Christian Bök 2015. Used with permission of Coach House Books 

 

 

 

 

 

 

“Uracil (C 4 H 4 N 2 O 2 ),” from The Xenotext: Book 1 

death had been caused by a snake 

bite received while she was fleeing a 

pursuer—none other than Aristæus 

himself. Proteus reveals that, in vengeance, 

“Orpheus,/the widower, hath 

inveighed against” him. Aristæus then 

makes appeasing sacrifices to Orpheus, 

Eurydice, and her nymphs to regenerate 

his beehives. 

Bök’s deep engagement with classical 

literature here connects to a 

contemporary scientific conundrum: 

What has been causing the recent decline 

of honeybees, key pollinators for 

a range of crops? “Colony Collapse 

Disorder” gives dimension to intimations 

of doom that recur throughout 

the book. In this case, a collapse of 

apiculture would trigger another in 

agriculture, which would lead to the 

collapse of culture writ large. 

Bök’s translation of Virgil is a beautiful 

one—precise, elegiac, intense: “Now 

harken to the keening of the hive:/not 

a wind that sighs amid the aspens/nor 

a tide that booms upon the oceans,/but 

more akin to some hellish bonfire,/trapped 

within the crucible of its 

kiln.” Bök’s nod to Virgil also references 

the Latin poet’s curious role in biogenetics: 

In 2003, a team at Icon Genetics 

enciphered a line from the Georgics— 

Nec vero terræ ferre omnes omnia possunt 

(“Nor can the earth bring forth all fruit 

alike”)—into the DNA of Arabidopsis 

thaliana, or thale cress, to show how scientists 

can effectively label genetically 

modified organisms. In “Colony Collapse 

Disorder” we see Bök exploring 

problems of science through decidedly 

humanistic and literary lenses. Further, 

this section demonstrates to critics who 

 

 

 

 

 

may be inclined to view 

The Xenotext as a mere 

fetishization of scientific 

novelty that Bök’s poetic 

chops and understanding 

of the Western canon are 

as good as any classicist’s. 

In the section “The 

March of the Nucleotides,” 

Bök brings didactic 

poetry into the 21st 

century by offering “a poetic 

primer, reacquainting 

the reader with some basic 

ideas in genetics.” Beneath 

short sections of explanatory 

prose that read 

like textbook excerpts 

(“The information enciphered 

by the series of 

bases in a strand of DNA 

is read from the 5'-end to the 3'-end”), 

Bök includes poetic fragments that 

elegantly translate scientific concepts 

into poetry, converting descriptions of 

DNA processes into metaphors with 

considerable aphoristic force: “DNA is 

a metamorphic scriptorium, where life transcribes, 

by chance, whatever life has so far 

learned about immortality.” 

But the highlight of this section 

is Bök’s experimentation with visually 

striking poetic configurations and 

formal constraints—characteristic elements 

of his work, found not only 

in Eunoia but also in his 1994 debut, 

Crystallography. He cleverly acknowledges 

the structure of DNA and RNA 

nucleobases through the structure of 

the poems themselves. He restricts 

the vocabulary of the poem featuring 

uracil (C 4 H 4 N 2 O 2 ), for instance, 

to four words beginning with “C,” 

four words beginning with “H,” two 

words beginning with “N,” and so 

on (see poem above left). He calls the 

form a modular acrostic. 

“Uracil” begins, “nymphical, honeybees/coproduce 

oversweet/nepenthes,” 

and the thick assonance echoing 

throughout the short piece seems to be 

figured in the bees’ “oversweet/nepenthes,” 

nearly to the point of miring 

down in it. Horace, Virgil’s friend and 

contemporary, remarked that poetry 

should be dulce et utile—sweet and useful. 

Bök takes this Horatian dictum to 

the extreme as he dazzles us with formalist 

brilliance while insisting on the 

importance of scientific literacy if we 

are to survive as a species. 

In another, more complicated series 

of poems, Bök conveys the form of 

DNA to the two-dimensional page. In a 

DNA double helix, the nucleobases pair 

in complementary ways (adenine always 

bonds with thymine and cytosine 

always bonds with guanine) because 

of certain hydrogen bonding patterns; 

these form the “rungs” of the spiral ladder. 

In these poems, Bök makes each 

letter that appears before a gap in the 

poetic line function as a corresponding 

nucleotide for the first letter that appears 

after the gap (see poem below). 

Each line has nine letters, and either 

“A” and “T” or “C” and “G” conjoin, 

facing each other across the gap as it 

angles across the poem. 

Moreover, the letters on the left-hand 

side of the gap form a sequence of codons, 

or nucleobase triplets, from the 

5'-end to the 3'-end. The codons, then, 

have enciphered a chain of 15 amino 

acids (the chain of isoleucine, serine, 

isoleucine, alanine, and so on is symbolized 

as “I S I A L I W L L L I R I F L”), 

which comprise a segment of protein. 

Bök then used a supercomputer to simulate 

models for the protein’s structure, 

from the folded sequence to its atomic 

backbone to the entire molecule with its 

charge envelope (see model on facing 

page). Across the trajectory of this poetic 

suite, we witness the radical translation 

of a series of innovative typographical 

poems into a fascinating series of visual 

poems without letters or words. 

Bök’s processes may seem needlessly 

convoluted, but they make us 

productively think about our expec- 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

From “The March of the Nucleotides,” The 

Xenotext: Book 1 





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Charge envelope for [ I S I A L I W L L L I R I F L ]. From 

“The March of the Nucleotides,” The Xenotext: Book 1 

tations of what work in the arts and 

humanities is supposed to accomplish 

and how that work is regarded 

by various audiences. For example, 

if a reader assumes that biotechnical 

processes of genetic engineering are 

complex—and, indeed, they are—why 

would that same reader expect a poem 

(or a work of literary criticism) to be 

immediately understandable? Poetic 

thinking, Bök seems to be arguing, 

should be as rigorous and, if need be, 

as complicated as scientific thought. 

In the realm of contemporary art 

and writing, there is a common perception 

that, since Marcel Duchamp’s 

bold provocations in the early 20th 

century, concept has trumped skill. In 

other words, the sort of idea that drove 

Duchamp to create, say, his infamous 

sculpture Fountain (1917)—a prefabricated 

urinal placed on a pedestal— 

takes precedence over any considerations 

of craftsmanship or execution. 

Indeed, art historian Benjamin Buchloh 

has remarked on the phenomenon 

of deskilling, the “persistent effort to 

eliminate artisanal competence and 

other forms of manual virtuosity from 

the horizon of both artistic production 

and aesthetic evaluation.” The conceptual 

premise behind Bök’s xenotext 

project—encoding poetry into 

bacteria—might strike some as the 

preposterously high-concept equal of 

that behind Duchamp’s Fountain. 

But rather than being an example of 

deskilled poetry, The Xenotext: Book 1 is 

hyperskilled: The complex structures 

that appear throughout the book, 

which include an extended anagram 

that is also a double 

acrostic, assure readers 

that high concepts and 

manual virtuosity can go 

hand in hand. Few poets 

have the technical excellence 

(or the patience) to 

pull off such feats, and 

in doing so Bök proves 

that he is as skilled at 

encoding extra layers of 

meaning into a poem as 

he is at encrypting poetry 

into DNA. Moreover, 

The Xenotext: Book 1 is an 

example of what I would 

call reskilled poetry, one 

that insists that writers 

learn new capabilities to 

respond to the complexities 

of 21st-century life. 

In an interview with New Scientist, Bök 

explained, “In order to do this project 

I’ve given myself a crash course in 

molecular biochemistry. I have taught 

myself computer programming skills; 

I have done all the genetic engineering 

and all the proteomic engineering myself. 

I think that part of the artistic exercise 

has been to acquire these skills.” 

Given the extremity of its concept 

and its reliance on a mixed array of 

scientific and representational strategies, 

The Xenotext: Book 1 is bound to 

provoke questions from various ideological 

camps within both scientific 

and literary studies. What are the gender 

politics of the call and response 

of Bök’s projected poems “Orpheus” 

and “Eurydice”? How viable is Bök’s 

assertion, based on the work of environmental 

biologist Chensheng Lu, 

that the pesticides called neonicotinoids 

are likely the cause of colony collapse 

disorder in bees? What are the bioethical 

ramifications of Bök’s overall project? 

Whatever the answers to these 

questions may be, Bök’s work is an 

important bridge not only between 

conservative formalists and cuttingedge 

conceptualists but between poetic 

and scientific communities. If The 

Xenotext does not save Bök’s poetry 

from future apocalypse—we will have 

to find out in the highly anticipated 

Book 2—it may, at the very least, save 

poetry from cultural irrelevance. 

Michael Leong is the author of several books and 

chapbooks of poetry. His most recent book, Cutting 

Time with a Knife, appeared in 2012, and his 

translation of the Chilean poet Estela Lamat’s book, 

I, the Worst of All, was published in 2009. He is 

assistant professor of English at the University at 

Albany, SUNY. 

An Arresting 

Alphabet 

A IS FOR ARSENIC: The Poisons of 

Agatha Christie. Kathryn Harkup. 318 

pp. Bloomsbury, 2015. $27.00. 

As much as I love my chosen 

field of toxicology, I don’t often 

turn to it as a topic for leisure 

reading. All too often toxicology texts 

can be dry and fact-dense. But sometimes 

I make exceptions. When I came 

across a book focusing on toxicological 

analysis of poisons used in Agatha 

Christie’s murder mysteries, I was 

intrigued. When I saw that the book 

opens with a quote from Shakespeare, 

my curiosity was further piqued. And 

when I found that the author is both 

a toxicologist and a fine storyteller, I 

realized that reading A Is for Arsenic 

would be a win-win. 

Author Kathryn Harkup, who holds 

a PhD in chemistry and has focused her 

research on phosphines, first explores 

Christie’s life and explains why she 

was uniquely qualified to write murder 

mysteries. The bestselling author, 

it turns out, had been an apothecary’s 

assistant during World War I. Because 

of her experience in the pharmacy, 

Harkup explains, she had an excellent 

understanding of compounds that 

could be used to either aid or harm, 

depending on the precise mixture and 

dose. Harkup also confesses her affection 

for Christie’s work. Rather than 

following the time-worn academic path 

of distancing herself from her subject as 

a display of objectivity, Harkup is open 

about her status as a Christie fan. It is a 

badge she wears with pride, and her affection 

for the books she discusses adds 

considerable warmth. 

As the book’s title implies, Harkup 

organizes the book alphabetically according 

to the poisons Christie uses 

in her novels. Chapter 2 is titled “B is 

for Belladonna”; chapter 3, “C is for 

Cyanide”; and so forth. Harkup introduces 

each poison by describing how 

it is used, both legally and illegally, and 

how Christie introduces it into her novels. 

She then discusses how the poison 

acts on the body and explains its history 

and origin, describing how it was 

discovered. For me, as a toxicologist, 





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these latter details are of particular interest, 

because my work tends to focus 

strictly on the poison itself. Instead 

of merely noting that “belladonna is 

the common name for nightshade, 

which is toxic due to the presence of 

Atropine”—information easily found 

in a toxicology textbook—and moving 

on, Harkup discusses the name’s origin 

in Greek mythology, then goes on 

to explore belladonna’s appearance in 

other literature, from the Bible to Shakespeare’s 

plays to the Harry Potter series. 

Harkup walks a fine and tricky 

line: She sidesteps potentially snoozeinducing 

scientific minutia while also 

managing to avoid dumbing down 

her topic. For instance, when she discusses 

the molecular actions of cyanide, 

she concisely describes what 

the compound targets in the cell and 

explains why that part of the cell is 

essential for its survival. She doesn’t 

go into the molecular mechanisms of 

inhibition that result from irreversible 

binding to cytochrome c oxidase, 

which halts the oxidative phosphorylation 

chain (zzzzz…); nor does she 

 

SILENT SPARKS: The Wondrous World 

of Fireflies. Sara Lewis. xiv + 223 pp. 

Princeton University Press, 2016. 

$29.95. 

state that cyanide is bad because a cell 

exposed to it cannot “breathe” (a common 

oversimplification). She explains 

that cyanide can bind to hemoglobin 

because of its physical similarity to 

iron, noting that this similarity allows 

cyanide to bind to an enzyme in the 

adenosine triphosphate production 

chain that also binds iron. Because 

cyanide can inhibit this enzyme, 

which is involved in energy production, 

the cell cannot function. 

Interweaving an account of the 

scientific importance of a compound 

with some discussion of its historical 

implications proves a fascinating 

approach. Harkup gives readers 

an expansive view of each toxin— 

explaining, for example, how a poison 

changed merchants’ trade routes, affected 

military science funding during 

World War I, or presented obstacles to 

scientists endeavoring to prove that a 

victim had succumbed to its effects. 

In her chapter on hemlock, Harkup 

tells of Socrates’s execution, going 

beyond the familiar parts of the tale. 

Unwilling to toe the political line, the 

Call these creatures what you will— 

lightning bugs, glowworms, fireflies— 

but watching an evening go by, the air 

lit by their sparks, is one of summertime’s 

simple pleasures. Development of 

the characteristics that happen to make 

fireflies so recognizable and charismatic 

has, however, involved complex processes. 

Over millennia, fireflies have followed 

widely varied evolutionary paths. 

In fact, nearly 2,000 species of fireflies 

have been discovered globally. This level 

of complexity might present a serious 

narrative challenge for some, but Tufts 

University biologist Sara Lewis’s fascination 

with these insects is captivating 

and infectious. From Japan to New England, Appalachia to Malaysia, Lewis explores 

how fireflies have specialized, occasionally to the point that their ostensibly defining 

features, “fire” and flight, have vanished. Some species require very specific habitats, 

such as Japan’s Genji firefly (above), which relies on rivers and streams, living underwater 

during the larval stage. Lewis talks to researchers who specialize in studying 

firefly species, considers threats to their habitats, and discusses the firefly as it has 

appeared in art and literature. She also supplies a handy field guide to the five most 

common groups of North American fireflies. Helpful notes direct readers to resources 

that will reveal more about finding, identifying, and understanding their own local 

species. —Dianne Timblin 

From Silent Sparks; photo by Tsuneaki Hiramatsu, 2012. 

philosopher ran afoul of the Athenian 

government and was condemned to 

death in 399 bce. His jailer, Harkup 

explains, was familiar enough with 

using hemlock for executions that 

he warned Socrates not to talk after 

drinking the poisoned cup, because 

doing so would interfere with the 

toxin’s action. That, in turn, would 

require the jailer to mix and administer 

another dose. “Socrates appears to 

have been indignant” about the order 

to stop talking, she says. “He told the 

jailer that he should be prepared to 

give him poison two or three times.” 

Finally, in each chapter Harkup 

guides the reader through plots from 

Christie’s novels that feature the selected 

poison, describing how the victim’s 

symptoms and death affect the plotline. 

Often she compares the fictional murders 

with historical poisonings or demonstrates 

how the symptoms described 

in the novel correlate with the pathological 

effects of toxic exposure related 

earlier in the chapter. In “O is for Opium,” 

Harkup discusses the novel Sad 

Cypress, which presents a case in which 

Hercule Poirot, Christie’s famously fastidious 

Belgian detective, must deduce 

how the poison was introduced to the 

victim—a task complicated by the fact 

that the toxin might have been consumed 

during a meal shared by two 

others who were asymptomatic. Poirot 

notices a pin-prick mark on the wrist 

of one of the other diners. This could 

indicate a potential means of introducing 

an antidote into her system, or it 

could simply be a mark from a rose 

thorn, as the diner claims. By comparing 

the effects of injected and ingested 

opium, he determines how the crime 

was committed and whether the diner 

was telling the truth. 

Perhaps most important, Harkup 

carefully warns her readers before 

discussing a novel’s ending. Those 

who skip the spoilers will find that 

Harkup’s background discussions of 

the poisons actually ratchet up the tension 

as she revisits certain details in 

the books. Readers may find themselves 

digging up Christie novels they 

haven’t perused to learn the identity 

of the poisoners—meanwhile enjoying 

another great read. 

Peter Broglie has a PhD in molecular toxicology and 

has worked in various toxicological and pharmaceutical 

laboratories. He is currently a bioanalytical 

project manager at Bioagilytix Labs in Durham, 

North Carolina. 




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July-August 2016 

Volume 25 

Number 4 

Sigma Xi Today 

A NEWSLETTER OF SIGMA XI, THE SCIENTIFIC RESEARCH SOCIETY 

Join us in Atlanta 

Registration for Sigma Xi’s 2016 Annual 

Meeting and Student Research Conference 

is open through August 1. This 

year’s events will be held November 

10–13 at the Hyatt Regency Atlanta in 

Atlanta, Georgia, USA. A celebration 

of research, these events bring together 

students and professional researchers 

from a variety of disciplines together 

to share their work and to discuss critical 

issues in science. Sigma Xi membership 

is not required to participate. 

 

to share a poster about their research 

in the new Sigma Xi Research Symposium. 

The symposium also includes 

sessions on the following topics: 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The second new event is the STEM 

Mixer, a dedicated time for networking 

between students and professional 

researchers. 

The Student Research Conference—a 

poster presentation competition for high 

school, undergraduate, and graduate 

students—includes a graduate school 

and career fair. Students who present a 

poster will receive feedback from judges 

and are invited to join Sigma Xi, the 

130-year-old, multidisciplinary honor 

society for scientists and engineers. 

A ceremony will be held during the 

meeting to induct new members into 

the Society. 

Attendees will get to see a special 

tary, 

The Truth About Trees, as well as science 

talks at venues around Atlanta and 

lectures by Sigma Xi’s award winners. 

For more information, and to learn how 

to become a meeting sponsor or exhibitor, 

go to https://www.sigmaxi.org/meetingsevents/annual-meeting. 

_____________________ 

______________ 

From the President 

Warning! Dangers Ahead for Science 

Back in 2014, I was asked “What are the most important 

scientific issues facing the world and the most important 

issues facing the scientific community?” I answered as follows 

and plan to write about many of these points in greater 

detail in the coming year: 

1. Science is rapidly losing its standing as the source of 

“public knowledge” (knowledge used to establish the 

facts) for resolving disputes and making decisions. 

2. Science is increasingly considered by others within academe 

as a non-objective social construct, fundamentally 

conservative, protective of the status quo, fraught with 

biases and self-justifying. 

President Tee L. 

Guidotti 

3. Science communication is generally poor and sometimes counterproductive. The 

best scientists are usually capable of explaining their work clearly. Alas, most are not. 

4. Science literacy is frighteningly weak in the U.S., the country that sets the science 

agenda. 

5. Science is valued as providing a cornucopia of economic benefits, rarely as a way 

of knowing the world. 

6. Explanatory science is being crowded out by approaches that emphasize association 

over causation, which is the essence of science; we should not confuse phenomenology 

and association with explanation and mechanism. 

7. Misbehavior by scientists is discrediting us in the eyes of the public but like much 

crime it is rewarded most of the time unless, and until, the perpetrator gets caught. 

8. Science is moving from a model of unfettered exploration to a model of “professionalization” 

without managing or even recognizing the transition, which may 

lead to many unintended consequences. 

9. Diversity in science is dealt with too narrowly, as a problem of access for the community 

and not a problem of the integrity of science. 

Sigma Xi, in partnership with other generalist science organizations such as the 

American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), can address and 

make progress on these problems in several ways: 

 

learned and practiced). 

 

 

shapers of public policy. 

 

and useful in public discourse. 

 

 

culture and intellectual life. 

This last point is critically important. Science is integral to our culture, not an addon 

or the concern only of scientists. It is a “way of knowing” that grounds our culture 

in objective truth, celebrates the search for verifiable knowledge, and rewards skepticism. 

Our culture needs science and we need to be in the mainstream of our culture. 

The mission of Sigma Xi has never been more important. 





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RESEARCH CONTEST 

Results of the 2016 Student Research Showcase 

Sigma Xi challenged students to present 

their research online in its 4th annual 

Student Research Showcase. In 

this science communication competition, 

approximately 40 high school, 

undergraduate, and graduate students 

submitted websites that contained abstracts, 

videos, and slideshows about 

their projects. To help the students 

learn how to change their presentation 

styles based on their audience, each 

component was intended for an audience 

with varying levels of technical 

 

across the United States and as far 

away as Ukraine. 

In April, 70 Sigma Xi members volunteered 

to judge the websites. The 

judges left comments and questions on 

the websites and then picked the top 

presentations in the High School, Undergraduate, 

and Graduate divisions. 

Each will receive $500 from Sigma Xi. 

Judges also selected the top winners 

in each research area. All participants 

receive judges’ comments, a certificate, 

and an invitation to become associate 

members of Sigma Xi. High school 

participants are invited to submit a research 

paper to Sigma Xi’s journal for 

pre-college research, Chronicle of The 

New Researcher. Congratulations to all 

participants! 

The deadline to submit a website for 

the 2017 Student Research Showcase is 

March 22. 

2016 Division Winners 

High School Division 

A Greener Cleaner: Investigating a Potential 

Biosorbent for the Removal of 

Heavy Metals from Aqueous Solutions 

 

School, Mountain View, California 

Undergraduate Division 

Mounting Evidence of the False Consensus 

Effect in Male Bodybuilders 

Bryan S. Nelson, Andre Nakkab, and 

 

Graduate Division 

Drying Without Dying—Resurrection 

Fern, Pleopeltis polypodioides 

 

at Lafayette 

People’s Choice Award, $250 

Development of a Novel Antiseptic 

Combination to Target MRSA and 

Pseudomonas 

Janie Kim of Scripps Ranch High 

School, San Diego, California 

New Leadership Elected 

In late 2015, Sigma Xi members elected 

new Sigma Xi leaders. The Sigma Xi 

leadership team appreciates efforts to 

nominate and select these generous 

volunteers. 

President-elect 

Stuart L. Cooper will serve as presidentelect 

from July 1, 2016, to June 30, 2017. 

He will be Sigma Xi president from July 1, 

2017, to June 30, 2018, then, he will serve 

as past president from July 1, 2018, to June 

30, 2019. 

Dr. Cooper is a professor of chemical 

engineering at Ohio State University. 

As Sigma Xi president, he plans 

to aggressively promote membership, 

especially to underrepresented 

groups in the 

science and engineering 

community. 

His other 

key priorities 

will be retaining 

current members 

and approaching 

Stuart L. Cooper former members 

about rejoining the Society. To attract 

members, the Society needs to emphasize 

“the value of Sigma Xi’s programmatic 

activities in areas such as ethics, 

entrepreneurship, diversity, and science 

communication,” Dr. Cooper wrote in 

his candidate statement. 

Directors 

These directors will serve three years, beginning 

July 1, 2016. 

North Central Region 

Carlo U. Segre, Illinois Institute of 

Technology 

Southwest Region 

Paul Marc Stein, University of California, 

Irvine 

Comprehensive Colleges and 

Universities Constituency 

Steve W. Martin, Iowa State University 

Area Groups/Industries/States and 

Federal Labs Constituency 

George Edw. Seymour, San Diego 

Sigma Xi Today is 

edited by Heather Thorstensen 

and designed by Justin Storms 

Associate Directors 

These associate directors will serve one- to 

three-year terms, beginning July 1, 2016. 

Northeast Region (3 years) 

Eugene Santos Jr., Dartmouth College 

Southeast Region (1 year) 

Lori G. Eckhardt, Auburn University 

Committee on Nominations 

The following elected committee members 

will serve three-year terms, which began at 

the conclusion of the election on November 

24, 2015. 

Northwest Region 

Tammy A. Maldonado, University of 

Colorado 

Southeast Region 

Michael C. Madden, University of 

North Carolina at Chapel Hill 

Membership-at-Large Constituency 

Elie Antoine Sehnaoui, Membershipat-Large 

Learn more about these members and 

read their candidate statements at https:// ____ 

_________________________ 

www.sigmaxi.org/about/leadership/societyelections/2015-results. 

_____________ 




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STUDENTS IN STEM 

Sigma Xi Supports the Innovative Spirit of Students 

Olivia Hutley, 16, of Australia was at 

NASA’s Kennedy Space Center Visitor 

Complex in April, holding an ancientlooking 

book just given to her from 

 

Conrad. She was so proud of it that 

she knew she would always keep it. 

After traveling half way across the 

world, she had overcome her nerves to 

give a presentation with her classmate, 

Kelsey Matuschka, 16, about a mobile 

app they had developed with two other 

classmates. Hutley learned how to 

use computer code to develop it. 

They were competing at the 2016 Innovation 

Summit, the finish line of the 

Conrad Spirit of Innovation Challenge. 

The challenge is an eight-month entrepreneurial 

contest run by the Con- 

 

school students to design products or 

services that would benefit humanity. 

Sigma Xi, The Scientific Research 

Society has supported the Conrad 

Spirit of Innovation Challenge since its 

beginning 10 years ago. The Society is 

one of the program’s technology sponsors, 

and its members represent the 

largest group of judges who evaluate 

the teams’ projects before the summit. 

More than 90 high school teams 

came to the summit, whittled from 140 

teams that submitted projects. They 

competed in one of four categories: 

aerospace and aviation, cyber technology 

and security, energy and environment, 

and health and nutrition. Before 

arriving, teams created portfolios with 

business and technical plans for their 

The summit’s masters of ceremony were 

sisters Shannon and Mikayla Diesch, who 

were named Pete Conrad Scholars in 2010 for 

a nutrition bar they made for astronauts. The 

bars actually went into space. 

products. Some even 

made prototypes. 

Soon after the summit 

kicked off, the top 

five finalist teams in 

each category were announced 

based on the 

merit of their portfolios. 

The finalists then 

 

which are presentations 

they might give 

to investors, on stage 

in front of more than 

300 students, parents, 

and coaches with the 

hope of qualifying for 

the top prize: being 

 

Scholar. The scholars 

receive a market research 

assessment, a 

plan to continue product 

development, a medallion, legal 

services worth $5,000 to file a patent application, 

and one year of dues paid for 

an associate membership in Sigma Xi. 

Additionally, teams that did well in 

 

invited to give their presentations on 

stage for the chance of winning certificates 

and trophies. 

 

 

the teams that their 

talents were needed 

for future missions to 

Mars and in the medical 

industry, how to 

leave positive impressions, 

and the importance 

of being open 

for—and preparing 

for—future opportunities. 

Students 

were invited to have 

a voice in their own 

education. 

 

affect the world,” said 

Nancy Conrad, chairman 

and founder of 

 

which runs the challenge 

in honor of her 

late husband, astro- 

 

Nancy Conrad, left, stands with Pete Conrad Scholars Dongyoon 

Shin, 18, and Dongsei Park, 17, of South Korea. Shin and Park 

logged more than 1,000 hours on making an improved space 

helmet and presented their plans at the 2016 Conrad Spirit of 

Innovation Challenge's Innovation Summit. On the right is 

Bob Cabana, former space shuttle commander and director of 

NASA’s Kennedy Space Center. 

She gave Hutley the book from 

 

 

the health and nutrition category. 

Their idea was a smartphone app that 

uses color to encourage a user to have 

better sleep and moods. 

“We can go so much further, we believe 

in the product,” said Hutley. 

Kelsey Matuschka, left, and Olivia Hutley of Australia were the 

Power Pitch winners for the health and nutrition category. The 

summit was held in April at NASA's Kennedy Space Center 

Visitor Complex. 





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AWARDS 

Serving Sigma Xi’s Mission 

Plant pathologist for the U.S. Department 

of Agriculture by day and Sigma Xi super 

volunteer by day and night—Cristina 

Gouin-Paul does a lot for the Society. She 

is president of the District of Columbia 

Chapter, director of the Mid-Atlantic Region, 

chair of the Committee on Qualifications 

and Membership, and photographer 

for the Annual Meeting. To recognize her 

outstanding volunteer service to Sigma Xi 

and its mission, the Society is honoring 

her with the 2016 Evan Ferguson Award. 

Heather Thorstensen, manager of communications, 

spoke with Gouin-Paul about 

her dedication to Sigma Xi and what it’s 

like to be on the board of directors. 

Thorstensen: Why is it important for you 

to be a part of the Society? 

Gouin-Paul: The ethics and public out- 

 

or get emails about stuff on the Internet 

that’s not true. It’s great to be able to 

pick up the phone and call somebody— 

somebody who you know through Sigma 

Xi—and ask, “OK, can you explain 

this to me? Because they’re not doing 

this right, but I can’t explain it any better,” 

then learn another piece of information. 

Sigma Xi allows me to interact with 

other people whose work may represent 

a small aspect of what I do, but you never 

know where a good idea is going to 

come from when you talk to somebody 

in science. A light bulb goes off. 

Thorstensen: What do you want members 

to know about what it’s like to be 

on the board of directors? 

Gouin-Paul: I think members think the 

board is there to run the Society. They 

don’t understand that they need to 

talk to us and tell us what they want 

the Society to do. I send an email to 

the Mid-Atlantic members asking, “Do 

you have ideas of what you think the 

Cristina Gouin-Paul is the 2016 recipient of 

the Evan Ferguson Award for Service to the 

Society. 

Society should be doing or shouldn’t 

be doing?” Being on the board allows 

me to have a say in how we can 

change and improve. 

To read what Gouin-Paul has learned from 

being a chapter president, go to _______ 

https://www. 

___________________________ 

sigmaxi.org/programs/prizes-awards/fergusonaward/award-winner/cristina-gouin-paul. 

_______________________ 

Innovation Award Winner Sculpts 

New Ideas 

Akhlesh Lakhtakia was picking up 

his daughter from her friend’s house 

when he noticed a mineral on a table, 

and it sparked an idea. 

“I picked it up and I was immediately 

floored,” he said. 

The mineral was ulexite, a crystal 

containing fibers that run in one direction. 

Lakhtakia could see through 

the crystal only when he looked in the 

same direction as the fibers. 

The next day, Lakhtakia, who at 

 

University associate professor of 

engineering science and mechanics, 

called his colleague, Russ Messier. 

Messier had experience in making 

thin films. Lakhtakia asked if a material 

could be made in the lab that had 

a fibrous structure like the crystal. 

Also, could the film be deposited on 

a rotating substrate, so that the fibers 

in the film can be twisted? If so, the 

film could be an optical filter, allowing 

only light with the same twisted 

polarization state to pass through. 

Research showed that the films 

could be made in a lab in a way 

Lakhtakia and Messier wanted the 

films to function optically: whether 

as a filter of light based on polariza- 

tion 

filters, for example, are used on 

cameras and in sunglasses to reduce 

the intensity of light entering eyes. 

This research resulted in sculptured 

 

which has fibers as small as 30–50 

nanometers in diameter. 

 

into a coating technique called bioreplication. 

Lakhtakia’s team, for ex- 

 

coat the top of a female emerald ash 

borer to form a mold, then used that 

mold to create hundreds of decoys 

so detailed that they trick males better 

than freshly sacrificed females, 

disrupting the invasive species’ mating 

cycle. His research also explored 

applications for solar energy and 

forensic science, and he is investigating 

larger microfibrous films for 

biomedical uses. 

Lakhtakia is the 2016 recipient 

of Sigma Xi’s 2016 Walston Chubb 

Akhlesh Lakhtakia will receive the 2016 

Walston Chubb Award for Innovation. 

Award for Innovation, due in large 

part to his leadership role in de- 

 

award, and give a lecture, at Sigma 

Xi’s Annual Meeting and Student 

Research Conference in Atlanta this 

November. 

To see a video with Lakhtakia discussing various 

uses of STFs, visit https://www.sigmaxi. 

____________ 

org/programs/prizes-awards/walston-chubb/ 

award-winner/akhlesh-lakhtakia. 

__________________ 




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SAVE TODAY. 

VACATION TOMORROW. 

You could save even more money 

on GEICO auto insurance with a 

special Sigma Xi member discount. 

Tell GEICO you are a Sigma Xi 

member and see how much more 

money you could save! Be sure 

to ask us about homeowners or 

renters insurance. We’d be happy 

to help you get a policy through 

the GEICO Insurance Agency. 

For a free quote 24 hours 

a day, visit geico.com/sigmaxi 

or call 1-800-947-AUTO. 

 

 

 

 



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American Scientist - Living With Fire

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