Table of contents for May 2017 in Discover

Talk about science, exploration, history and ideas, and one popular image from my 1970s youth immediately hits me. And makes me laugh. It’s a big, framed painting (at right) of ships hitting the end of the world, with a crew in a lifeboat rowing like mad away from the brink. Four words are etched into a brass plate at the base of the frame: I Told You So. Sarcastic? Sure. Appropriate to launch you into our Heroes of Science special section? Absolutely. For it’s only through scientists and the foundation of inquiry that we know the Earth is indeed a sphere, that our planet revolves around the sun and that gravity is a fundamental force. Scientific discovery is a linchpin of progress, in society, industry, culture and thought. We’ve rounded…

BACK AROUND THE TURN of the millennium, Susan Anderson was puzzling over a problem in ethics. Is there a way to rank competing moral obligations? The University of Connecticut philosophy professor posed the problem to her computer scientist spouse, Michael Anderson, figuring his algorithmic expertise might help. At the time, he was reading about the making of the film 2001: A Space Odyssey, in which spaceship computer HAL 9000 tries to murder its human crewmates. “I realized that it was 2001,” he recalls, “and that capabilities like HAL’s were close.” If artificial intelligence was to be pursued responsibly, he reckoned that it would also need to solve moral dilemmas. In the 16 years since, that conviction has become mainstream. Artificial intelligence now permeates everything from health care to warfare, and…

The male Chapman’s blue butterfly — native to southern Europe, Morocco and the Middle East — is known for its wings of shimmering azure. Even at 500x magnification, the hue remains intense. But this striking shade doesn’t stem from pigment; it’s created when light passes through nanostructures within the scales, an effect known as diffraction. Chemist Anne Gleich of Kaiserslautern, Germany, snapped this image to learn more about the process. The photo won an Image of Distinction award in the 2016 Nikon Small World contest.…

1. JAW TAGS Researchers use these external tags, about the size of a quarter, to identify whether a fish has an internal tracker implanted in it. It’s usually fit onto a fish’s lower mandible. 2. POP-UP SATELLITE ARCHIVAL TAG This external tag collects detailed data on fish vitals, location and environmental information, such as light levels. 3. ACOUSTIC TRANSMITTER Internal or external tag that’s ideal for tracking fish in deeper water. These transmitters produce a unique set of pings that get assigned to an individual fish. To collect data, researchers either go out in a vessel to pick up signals or download the information from receivers stationed in the fish’s environment. 4. CINCH TAGS This type of external tag indicates the fish bearing it is part of a study and…

HERE’S A THOUGHT EXPERIMENT: Imagine astronomers didn’t really believe that Earth orbits the sun or that our world turns daily on its axis. What if they viewed the heliocentric model of the solar system merely as an abstract mathematical tool to track planets and stars with great precision, not as a literal description of the way things are? What if they claimed we can’t truly know whether the sun orbits Earth or vice versa and, moreover, that such questions were not even worth asking? It would be preposterous. No respectable scientist would ever entertain such notions — except when it comes to the most powerful theory in the history of physics: quantum mechanics. More than a century after its birth, quantum mechanics, the physics of atoms, photons and other particles,…

Despite her French name, Marie Curie’s story didn’t start in France. Her road to Paris and success was a hard one, as equally worthy of admiration as her scientific accomplishments. Born Maria Salomea Sklodowska in 1867 in Warsaw, Poland, she faced some daunting hurdles, both because of her gender and her family’s poverty, which stemmed from the political turmoil at the time. Her parents, deeply patriotic Poles, lost most of their money supporting their homeland in its struggle for independence from Russian, Austrian and Prussian regimes. Her father, a math and physics professor, and her mother, headmistress of a respected boarding school in Russian-occupied Warsaw, instilled in their five kids a love of learning. They also imbued them with an appreciation of Polish culture, which the Russian government discouraged. When…

I saac Newton was born on Christmas Day, 1642. Never the humble sort, he would have found the date apt: The gift to humanity and science had arrived. A sickly infant, his mere survival was an achievement. Just 23 years later, with his alma mater Cambridge University and much of England closed due to plague, Newton discovered the laws that now bear his name. (He had to invent a new kind of math along the way: calculus.) The introverted English scholar held off on publishing those findings for decades, though, and it took the Herculean efforts of friend and comet discoverer Edmund Halley to get Newton to publish. The only reason Halley knew of Newton’s work? A bet the former had with other scientists on the nature of planetary orbits.…

Nikola Tesla grips his hat in his hand. He points his cane toward Niagara Falls and beckons bystanders to turn their gaze to the future. This bronze Tesla — a statue on the Canadian side — stands atop an induction motor, the type of engine that drove the first hydroelectric power plant. We owe much of our modern electrified life to the lab experiments of the Serbian-American engineer, born in 1856 in what’s now Croatia. His designs advanced alternating current at the start of the electric age and allowed utilities to send current over vast distances, powering American homes across the country. He developed the Tesla coil — a high-voltage transformer — and techniques to transmit power wirelessly. Cellphone makers (and others) are just now utilizing the potential of this…

In 1924, scientific consensus held that humans had evolved somewhere in Eurasia. After all, human-like fossils had been found from Germany’s Neander Valley to the Indonesian island of Java. Then an Australian anatomist working in South Africa received a package. The delivery was expected. Its contents were not. The box was supposed to contain a fossilized partial baboon skull from a limestone quarry in the country’s heartland. Raymond Dart had planned to add it to a museum collection. To Dart’s surprise, the skull in the box belonged to a child. Not a human child, but also not a baboon. The specimen was large-brained. Because the spinal cord entered the skull at the bottom rather than at the back, as it does for chimps, Dart believed the individual had walked upright…

Along the southern coast of England, waves crash against sea cliffs, eroding the rock and revealing fossils that span the Mesozoic Era, the time of dinosaurs and giant reptiles. For centuries, locals combed the beaches, or picked their way up the crumbling cliffs, looking for curiosities to sell to tourists and collectors. It was dangerous work, but Mary Anning’s father taught her the trade when she was still a child. When he died young, it became a way for Anning to help support her family. Anning was no more than 13 years old when she found her first notable fossil, in 1812: the fossilized body matching the Ichthyosaurus skull her older brother had uncovered the previous year. She soon discovered more, including plesiosaurs, fish, invertebrates and a pterosaur, England’s first.…

I n 1962, Francis Crick, James Watson and Maurice Wilkins shared the Nobel Prize for describing DNA’s double-helix structure — arguably the greatest discovery of the 20th century. But no one mentioned Rosalind Franklin — arguably the greatest snub of the 20th century. The British-born Franklin was a firebrand, a perfectionist who worked in isolation. “She was prickly, did not make friends easily, but when she did she was outgoing and loyal,” Jenifer Glynn wrote in My Sister Rosalind Franklin. Franklin was also a brilliant chemist and a master of X-ray crystallography, an imaging technique that reveals the molecular structure of matter based on the pattern of scattered X-ray beams. Her early research into the microstructures of carbon and graphite are still cited, but her work with DNA was the…

As science progresses, so does the roll call of new voices serving as bridges between lab and layman. Here are some of our favorite emerging science stars: British physicist Brian Cox became a household name in the U.K. in less than a decade, thanks to his accessible explanations of the universe in TV and radio shows, books and public appearances. Neuroscientist Carl Hart debunks anti-science myths supporting misguided drug policies via various media, including his memoir High Price. From the Amazon forest to the dissecting table, YouTube star and naturalist Emily Graslie brings viewers into the guts of the natural world, often literally. When not talking dinosaurs or head transplants on Australian radio, molecular biologist Upulie Divisekera coordinates @RealScientists, a rotating Twitter account for science outreach. Mixing pop culture and chemistry, analytical…

A smattering of crisp, white clouds lingers west of Grand Canyon National Park. And as the desert sun sets, smoke from a far-off fire turns the sky as red as the surrounding Supai sandstone. Venus slowly emerges from behind the clouds like a beacon of the night. Jupiter and the evening star push toward the horizon, racing the crescent moon in a perfect isosceles triangle. Their setting leaves an inky black sky bustling with activity. Faint stray meteors streak at zenith, and satellites crawl across the sky like ants on their ardent paths. If you sat here on a moonless night like this and counted through until dawn, you could tally thousands of stars. “The place you are in is special — keep that in your mind — in contrast…

1 Our planet is full of famous shaky spots — California, Japan, New Zealand and so on — but the father of modern seismology hailed from comparatively stable Ireland. 2 In 1849, Dublin-born engineer Robert Mallet detonated kegs of gunpowder he’d buried on a beach to test how shock waves traveled through rock and other material: the world’s first seismological experiment. 3 We’ve also got Mallet to thank for the very word seismology. He coined the term from the Greek seismos, or earthquake. 4 Mallet wasn’t the first to study tremors, though. Back in the fourth century B.C., for example, Aristotle theorized that surface shakes were caused by winds whooshing through underground spaces. 5 In the second century A.D., China’s Zhang Heng created the first seismoscope, which reportedly picked up…

PRINT FEEDBACK Modern-Day Mummies? I particularly enjoyed the March issue’s stories about bees, thalidomide and princess mummies! One question regarding mummies: Has anybody around the world buried a mummy with paraphernalia from our era so that it can be discovered hundreds of years from now? What a great idea that would help our descendants know how we existed. Bonnie Holiday, Crown Point, IN A Meeting of the Minds I’m a bit slow reading my Discover, but the article “Death From Above” (September 2016 issue) brought back some fond memories of encounters with Luis Alvarez. He was at Hewlett-Packard at the time and came to our division in Colorado Springs, where I worked as a technical writer. He wove a captivating story of extinction, iridium and a really big meteor. Our very…

ONCE UPON A TIME in Asia Minor, people started to tell the tale of The Smith and the Devil. The plot was simple: A craftsman trades his soul for supernatural power, then uses his magic to trap the diabolical creature with whom he made the deal. Folklorists, including the Brothers Grimm, have long assumed the story, as well as other tales such as Rumpelstiltskin and Beauty and the Beast, is ancient. Now, there’s firm evidence for that from Durham University anthropologist Jamshid Tehrani and New University of Lisbon social scientist Sara Graça da Silva. Treating each tale as a species that mutates over time, they’ve borrowed techniques from phylogenetics (the study of evolutionary relationships between living organisms) to map stories onto the tree of Indo-European languages. The Smith and the…

A crowd barged past dioramas, glass displays and wide-eyed security guards in the American Museum of Natural History. Screams rang out as some runners fell and were trampled. Upon arriving at a lecture hall, the mob broke down the door. The date was Jan. 8, 1930, and the New York museum was showing a film about Albert Einstein and his general theory of relativity. Einstein was not present, but 4,500 mostly ticketless people still showed up for the viewing. Museum officials told them “no ticket, no show,” setting the stage for, in the words of the Chicago Tribune, “the first science riot in history.” Such was Einstein’s popularity. As a publicist might say, he was the whole package: distinctive look (untamed hair, rumpled sweater), witty personality (his quips, such as…

Chien-Shiung Wu’s path to the highest levels of science began in coastal China’s Jiangsu Province. She arrived in the U.S. in 1936 to pursue a doctorate at the University of California, Berkeley. While there, her experiments with X-ray emissions and xenon gas became important contributions to the Manhattan Project. But it was her work a few years later, at Columbia University, that would earn her a place in the physics pantheon. Wu was the first to verify — and later refine — Enrico Fermi’s theory of radioactive betadecay, which describes how some unstable atoms emit radiation when transforming into more stable atoms. In 1956, other researchers asked Wu to help them prove their hypothesis about a breakdown of the law of parity. The law states that objects and their mirror…

One of the biggest honors a scientist can receive is to become the namesake of a unit of measurement — a fitting reward if they’re the ones who discovered what’s being measured in the first place. (All four of our “Rushmore” scientists have units named after them, though only Newton’s made it into the official International System of Units.) Sometimes, though, the label is all we know of the scientist. Let’s revisit the people behind the units. DANIEL GABRIEL FAHRENHEIT (1686–1736) The Dutch physicist invented alcohol and mercury thermometers, as well as the temperature scale that now bears his name (and perplexes the world outside the U.S. and a handful of other countries), with 0 degrees marking the temperature of a 1-1 mix of ice and salt. ANDERS CELSIUS (1701–1744)…

ISAAC ASIMOV (1920–1992) Asimov was my gateway into science fiction, then science, then everything else. He penned some of the genre’s most iconic works — fleshing out the laws of robotics, the messiness of a galactic empire, the pitfalls of predicting the future — in simple, effortless prose. A trained biochemist, the Russian-born New Yorker wrote prolifically, producing over 400 books, not all science-related: Of the 10 Dewey Decimal categories, he has books in nine. — B.A. RICHARD FEYNMAN (1918–1988) Feynman played a part in most of the highlights of 20th-century physics. In 1941, he joined the Manhattan Project. After the war, his Feynman diagrams — for which he shared the ’65 Nobel Prize in Physics — became the standard way to show how subatomic particles interact. As part of…

T o say she was ahead of her time would be an understatement. Ada Lovelace earned her place in history as the first computer programmer — a full century before today’s computers emerged. She couldn’t have done it without British mathematician, inventor and engineer Charles Babbage. Their collaboration started in the early 1830s, when Lovelace was just 17 and still known by her maiden name of Byron. (She was the only legitimate child of poet Lord Byron.) Babbage had drawn up plans for an elaborate machine he called the Difference Engine — essentially, a giant mechanical calculator. In the middle of his work on it, the teenage Lovelace met Babbage at a party. met Babbage at a party. There, he showed off an incomplete prototype of his machine. According to…

I t started in Sweden: a functional, user-friendly innovation that took over the world, bringing order to chaos. No, not an Ikea closet organizer. We’re talking about the binomial nomenclature system, which has given us clarity and a common language, devised by Carl Linnaeus. Linnaeus, born in southern Sweden in 1707, was an “intensely practical” man, according to Sandra Knapp, a botanist and taxonomist at the Natural History Museum in London. He lived at a time when formal scientific training was scant and there was no system for referring to living things. Plants and animals had common names, which varied from one location and language to the next, and scientific “phrase names,” cumbersome Latin descriptions that could run several paragraphs. The 18th century was also a time when European explorers…

More than 65 years after her death, Henrietta Lacks’ contributions to science are a cause célèbre. HBO planned to air a movie about her life in April; high-profile lectures and conferences now bear her name. When Lacks died at 31, however — a wife, a mother of five and an impoverished black tobacco farmer struck down by cervical cancer — she was virtually unknown. Tissues from the malignancy were collected, without the knowledge or consent of Lacks or her family, and used to create the first human-derived cell lines. HeLa, as the cell lines are known, have proven invaluable for cancer research. They have been the basis of tens of thousands of experiments. But researchers barely tried to protect Lacks’ identity, treating her cells as no different from a sample…

1825: Only the second dinosaur (after Megalosaurus) to be classified scientifically, the species’s first fragmentary fossils were named by British paleontologist Gideon Mantell for the similarity of their teeth to those of iguanas. In addition to reconstructing Iguanodon as a stout, tail-dragging reptile, early paleontologists placed a finger bone on the animal’s snout. (Fun fact: The individuals Mantell initially described as Iguanodon were reclassified in the 20th century as relatives Therosaurus and Mantellisaurus.) 1851: Dining or dino-ing? A London event held inside a reconstructed Iguanodon was the talk of the town and helped cement the notion of the dinosaur as a tanklike, spike-nosed reptile. 1878: It was one step forward, one step back when several Iguanodon specimens turned up in Bernissart, Belgium. The completeness of multiple individuals confirmed once and…

CRAIG McCLAIN is no stranger to what lurks in the belly of Earth’s oceans. The deep-sea biologist is currently executive director of the Louisiana University Marine Consortium. Throughout his career, he‘s tackled many questions about aquatic life, from how food availability affects species to how marine environments impact an organism’s size. Searching for those answers, he’s crossed paths with beasts like the giant isopod, a crustacean that, according to McClain, “is essentially just a roly-poly that‘s double the size of your shoe.” To see his subjects up close, McClain hops a ride in a submersible, a 23-by-8-foot research vessel designed to withstand the enormous pressure at seafloor levels. But before he was heading up labs and leading his own dives, McClain was a rookie. Here, he recounts his first, surreal…

MORE THAN A DECADE AGO, Discover covered the concept of a coffee-makerlike device that could, overnight, turn a few animal muscle stem cells into a nice hunk of meat. The July 2006 story, “The Way of All Flesh,” explains the vision of biologist Vladimir Mironov: Those muscle cells would be harmlessly extracted from an animal, and with the right nutrients and environment, they’d multiply just as they would in their original host, but even more rapidly. The idea was to target three issues with traditional meat farming: protect animals from inhumane conditions and eventual slaughter; reduce the environmental damage of largescale livestock operations; and give humans healthier meat and better food security. Yet, as you’ve noticed, your local Target stocks no such appliance. Mironov says his vision hasn’t changed, but he’s…

Observe. Hypothesize. Experiment. Revise. Repeat. The scientific method is the foundation upon which researchers build. The man who laid the groundwork for it, however, is all but forgotten in the West. Born in the mid-10th century in what is now Iraq, Ibn al-Haytham, known to English speakers as Alhazen, was a man of endless curiosity. At a time when the Arabicspeaking world was the epicenter of scientific inquiry, Alhazen was one of its brightest stars. He wrote more than 100 books on physics, mathematics and astronomy, among other fields, and is believed to be the first to explain how our brains create the illusion of the moon appearing larger near the horizon. His pioneering work on optics inspired the likes of Roger Bacon and Johannes Kepler centuries later. But Alhazen’s…

When he was barely a teenager in the 1780s, Francis Beaufort went to sea in the British Royal Navy. On his first voyage, to China, the ship foundered because of inaccurate navigational charts. Beaufort and other crew members spent five days on the open water before being rescued. The harrowing experience set him on his life’s course. When he was a midshipman, Beaufort began making weather reports every two hours rather than the standard 12- to 24-hour span. By the time he was in command, he kept a detailed weather journal as well, and he had devised a system of alphanumeric notations about weather conditions that became standard throughout the Navy. You may have heard of the Beaufort Scale, which evolved out of his notation system and classifies wind force.…

Charles Darwin would not have been anyone’s first guess for a revolutionary scientist. As a young man, his main interests were collecting beetles and studying geology in the countryside, occasionally skipping out on his classes at the University of Edinburgh Medical School to do so. It was a chance invitation in 1831 to join a journey around the world that would make Darwin, who had once studied to become a country parson, the father of evolutionary biology. Aboard the HMS Beagle, between bouts of seasickness, Darwin spent his five-year trip studying and documenting geological formations and myriad habitats throughout much of the Southern Hemisphere, as well as the flora and fauna they contained. Darwin’s observations pushed him to a disturbing realization — the Victorian-era theories of animal origins were all…

A round Dec. 1, 1609, Italian mathematician Galileo Galilei pointed a telescope at the moon and created modern astronomy. His subsequent observations turned up four satellites — massive moons — orbiting Jupiter, and showed that the Milky Way’s murky light shines from many dim stars. Galileo also found sunspots upon the surface of our star and discovered the phases of Venus, which confirmed that the planet circles the sun inside Earth’s own orbit. “I give infinite thanks to God, who has been pleased to make me the first observer of marvelous things,” he wrote. The 45-year-old Galileo didn’t invent the telescope, and he wasn’t the first to point one at the sky. But his conclusions changed history. Galileo knew he’d found proof for the theories of Polish astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus…

M emories of middle or high school geometry invariably include an instructor drawing right triangles on a blackboard to explain the Pythagorean theorem. The lesson was that the square of the hypotenuse, or longest side, is equal to the sum of the squares of the other sides. Simply put: a2 + b2 = c2. A proof followed, adding a level of certainty rare in other high school classes, like social studies and English. Pythagoras, a sixth-century B.C. Greek philosopher and mathematician, is credited with inventing his namesake theorem and various proofs. But forget about the certainty. Babylonian and Egyptian mathematicians used the equation centuries before Pythagoras, says Karen Eva Carr, a retired historian at Portland State University, though many scholars leave open the possibility he developed the first proof. Moreover,…

Born in Edinburgh at the height of the Enlightenment, James Hutton was a gifted observer. With that skill he would formulate the first theories of deep time, and of how our planet’s surface constantly recycles itself — ideas considered heretical in his day. Hutton’s work became the basis of modern geology, inspired Charles Darwin and prefigured plate tectonics, volcanology, geobiology and the Gaia Hypothesis, a late-20th-century view of the planet as a single self-regulating organism. His keen eyes also steered him away early on from a different path. After attending medical school in the 1740s, Hutton opted to become a gentleman farmer. He traveled through much of Britain learning the latest agricultural techniques, but the landscapes themselves increasingly drew his attention. He became obsessed with unconformities in the rocks, where…

SEAN M. CARROLL (1966– ) The physicist (and one-time Discover blogger) has developed a following among space enthusiasts through his lectures, television appearances and books, including The Particle at the End of the Universe, on the Higgs boson. RACHEL CARSON (1907–1964) With her 1962 book Silent Spring, the biologist energized a nascent environmental movement. In 2006, Discover named Silent Spring among the top 25 science books of all time. RICHARD DAWKINS (1941– ) The biologist, a charismatic speaker, first gained public notoriety in 1976 with his book The Selfish Gene, one of his many works on evolution. JANE GOODALL (1934– ) Studying chimpanzees in Tanzania, Goodall’s patience and observational skills led to fresh insights into their behavior — and led her to star in a number of television documentaries. STEPHEN…

Most people don’t even know they have a pancreas, let alone what it does. One of my patients, Richard, was no exception. He came to see me after experiencing several months of weight loss and fatigue. A CT scan revealed a concerning spot on his pancreas as well as other spots on his liver, and a biopsy confirmed our worst fears: He had pancreatic cancer. The spots on his liver also were pancreatic cancer cells, indicating the cancer had spread, or metastasized, to another organ. Richard’s cancer was advanced and likely to result in his death. In more than two decades as a doctor, I’ve diagnosed more than 1,000 patients with pancreatic cancer, and giving this kind of news is never easy. Richard was 65, had just retired a few…