B U R N I N G M A N ’ S VA N I S H I N G AC T P.

46

Discover
SCIENCE FOR THE CURIOUS

®
SEPTEMBER 2018

TECH
EXPLOSION
How Nuclear Weapons
Are Sparking a
Digital Revolution

PLUS

Keeping the Random

in Random Numbers P.54
BONUS
A Symphony in the Sea P.40 ONLINE
CONTENT
How Coincidence Works P.24 CODE p.3
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 Contents
SEPTEMBER 2018
Website access code: DSD1809
Enter this code at: www.DiscoverMagazine.com/code
to gain access to exclusive subscriber content.

VOL. 39, NO. 7 FEATURES

29 Tech
Explosion
Scientists can’t explode
nukes in the real world, so
they’ve gotten creative —
and helped spark a tech
revolution in the process.
BY ERIC BETZ

40 Hearing
Nemo
It turns out fsh are quite
the chatterboxes. Scientists
have begun eavesdropping
on the conversations
happening beneath
the waves.
BY HELEN SCALES

46 Te
Vanishing
City
Burning Man’s temporary
desert community has
attracted the interest of
two scientists. Their work
is broadening a novel feld
of archaeology.
BY JONATHON KEATS

54 Chance
Encounters
Random numbers are
the foundation of online
security, protecting
everything from urban
infrastructure to airline
SCOTT LONDON AND JEREMY GUILLORY

ticket sales. But the

numbers are running
The annual pop-up city for Burning
out, and creating more is
Man gives scientists a front-row harder than it sounds.
seat to study what is (and isn’t) BY TIM FOLGER
left behind. See page 46.

September 2018 DISCOVER 3

 Contents
COLUMNS & DEPARTMENTS

6 EDITOR’S NOTE
Nuclear Fallout
As a nuclear arms race ended,
a nuclear tech race began.

7 INBOX
Readers weigh in on future tech
and an unhealthy diet in the early
1900s American South.

9 THE CRUX
Special metal disks that help
map the cosmos also make
spiffy coffee tables; over
10 years ago, a man boldly
claimed to have found ancient
pyramids — now he has more
We are due for
to say; a global census of life what could be the
on Earth reveals plants hold astronomical event
of the century. Read
the upper hand; and more. more on page 68.

B U R N I N G M A N ’ S VA N I S H I N G AC T
18 VITAL SIGNS 62 ORIGIN STORY
P.46

Discover
SCIENCE FOR THE CURIOUS

Tongue Twister Hopeful Monsters ®

SEPTEMBER 2018

Paul and Janet had been married Is it time to tear up the old lexicon TECH
for 40 years. But one day, Paul woke and redefne what a species is? EXPLOSION
up speaking a language she couldn’t BY BRIDGET ALEX How Nuclear Weapons
Are Sparking a
Digital Revolution
understand. BY ELIEZER J. STERNBERG

TOP: ROEN KELLY/DISCOVER. BOTTOM FROM LEFT: ISSELEE/DREAMSTIME.COM; GEKASKR/DREAMSTIME.COM

68 OUT THERE
24 MIND OVER MATTER Tonight’s Supernova PLUS

What a Coincidence A massive explosion could Keeping the Random

in Random Numbers P.54

People who seek meaning light up our skies, and it’s long A Symphony in the Sea P.40

How Coincidence Works P.24

in life tend to fnd it … overdue. BY YVETTE CENDES

everywhere.
BY AMY PATUREL
74 20 THINGS YOU DIDN’T ON THE COVER
KNOW ABOUT …
Burning Man’s Vanishing Act p.46
Graphene Tech Explosion p.29
It’s in your pencil, can color Keeping the Random in
your hair and one day Random Numbers p.54
The definition of might propel you A Symphony in the Sea p.40
species may need through space.
some tweaking. How Coincidence Works p.24
Read more on BY GEMMA TARLACH
COVER: A nuclear blast was part of Operation Plumbbob in
page 62. 1957 at the Nevada National Security Site. Image by the USAF
Lookout Mountain Laboratory

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SCIENCE FOR THE CURIOUS

Editor's Note ®

BECKY LANG Editor In Chief

DAN BISHOP Design Director
EDITORIAL

Nuclear Fallout
GEMMA TARLACH Senior Editor
BILL ANDREWS Senior Associate Editor
ELISA R. NECKAR Production Editor
MARK BARNA Associate Editor
ERIC BETZ Associate Editor
LACY SCHLEY Assistant Editor
In November 1983, the specter DAVE LEE Copy Editor
of nuclear warfare landed in AMBER JORGENSON Editorial Assistant
our living rooms. I was a middle ERIKA K. CARLSON AAAS Mass Media Fellow
Contributing Editors
schooler, and many of my friends TIM FOLGER, JONATHON KEATS,
and their parents were keyed up LINDA MARSA, KENNETH MILLER,
STEVE NADIS, ADAM PIORE,
for The Day After. The made- COREY S. POWELL, JULIE REHMEYER,
for-TV movie would hold millions STEVE VOLK, PAMELA WEINTRAUB,
JEFF WHEELWRIGHT,
in rapt attention as nuclear fallout DARLENE CAVALIER (SPECIAL PROJECTS)
spread radiation sickness through ART
a Kansas community. I vividly ERNIE MASTROIANNI Photo Editor
ALISON MACKEY Associate Art Director
remember gathering in front of
DISCOVERMAGAZINE.COM
our small black-and-white TV in NATHANIEL SCHARPING Assistant Editor
the basement, and I was thankful Bloggers
it was on the station that came in MEREDITH CARPENTER, LILLIAN FRITZ-LAYLIN,
JEREMY HSU, ERIK KLEMETTI, REBECCA KRESTON,
clearly. (The big antenna out in NEUROSKEPTIC, SCISTARTER, AMY SHIRA TEITEL,
the woods near our house pulled CHRISTIE WILCOX, TOM YULSMAN

in exactly three channels.) ADVERTISING

STEVE MENI Advertising Sales Manager
That one night had nuclear 888 558 1544
weapons front and center for over smeni@discovermagazine.com
Rummel Media Connections
100 million Americans. It was KRISTI RUMMEL Consulting and Media Sales
my generation’s duck-and-cover 608 435 6220
kristi@rummelmedia.com
drill. For kids in Montana, like me, it was another reminder that
MELANIE DECARLI Marketing Architect
missile silos were sitting, waiting, in bunkers across the state. BOB RATTNER Research
It would be nearly another decade before the U.S. declared an DARYL PAGEL Advertising Services

end to nuclear weapons testing underground. The policy change KALMBACH MEDIA
DAN HICKEY Chief Executive Officer
drove scientists to instead test weapons virtually, with computer CHRISTINE METCALF Senior Vice President, Finance
models. A nuclear arms race ended, and a tech race began — STEPHEN C. GEORGE Vice President, Content
NICOLE MCGUIRE Vice President, Consumer Marketing
and it’s still going. BRIAN J. SCHMIDT Vice President, Operations
Discover’s Eric Betz takes readers through the winding SARAH A. HORNER Vice President, Human Resources
story of the competition between the U.S. and China for the DAVID T. SHERMAN Senior Director, Advertising Sales
and Events
fastest supercomputers, and how that is expected to drive tech SCOTT REDMOND Advertising Sales Director
development, from weather forecasting to medical treatments. LIZ RUNYON Circulation Director
MICHAEL SOLIDAY Art and Production Manager
In the last several months, nuclear weapons have again been in CATHY DANIELS New Business Manager
our minds. What happens next isn’t scripted. But I’m optimistic KATHY STEELE Retention Manager
KIM REDMOND Single Copy Specialist
that any day-after theatrics for future generations will stay
confned to our video screens. SCIENCE GROUP
BECKY LANG Executive Editor
DAN BISHOP Design Director

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 Inbox
PRINT FEEDBACK
What Can’t Be Done?
(“Whatever Happened
to the Future?” June 2018)
This is a terrifc article that I
read with great interest. I am
a licensed pilot with a degree
in aeronautical engineering.
I supervised 50 design
engineers on the Apollo
backpack used on the
moon. When I was a kid in
Brookfeld, Massachusetts,
in the 1940s, the old-timers
told me the moon was made
of blue cheese and that
going there was inconceiv-
able. Well, it turned out that
we did it in my lifetime and
that I worked on it! The
next challenge for humans
is to exceed the speed
ADDRESS LETTERS TO: DISCOVER
21027 Crossroads Circle, P.O. Box 1612
Waukesha, WI 53187-1612
EMAIL: editorial@DiscoverMagazine.com
MULTIMEDIA FEEDBACK
Scourge of the South
(“A Deadly Diet,”
March 2018)
In the early 1900s, physicians
fought a recurring battle in
the American South, against
a disease called pellagra.
It turns out corn-based diets
were to blame for the condi-
tion, which was marked by
symptoms including diarrhea,
dementia and even death.
Here’s what some of our
online readers thought of
our dive back into medical
history:
Atlanta_Girl: Imagine if the molasses or cornmeal
industry had sponsored the research back then . . .
Feedback is edited for space and clarity.
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September 2018 DISCOVER 7
 
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THE PROBLEM. In 1935 Erwin Schrödinger proposed an
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quantum is to be an indivisible unit, and in any case, it
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result. At least QFT provides a reason: quanta are
indivisible units.
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THE CRUX T H E LAT EST S CI E N C E N E WS A N D N O T ES

LEPROSY’S LONG LEGACY

These wasted foot bones of a medieval Dane show clear evidence of leprosy. Previous research pointed to Africa or the Near East
as the likely birthplace of the stigmatizing disease. But in a recent study, a team reconstructed 10 genomes of Mycobacterium
leprae, the bacterium that causes the malady, from the remains of nearly 100 medieval Europeans, including this Danish
individual. The genetic diversity of the M. leprae strains found raises new questions about the disease’s origins, which actually
may have been in Europe.  ERNIE MASTROIANNI; PHOTO BY DORTHE DANGVARD PEDERSEN

September 2018 DISCOVER 9

THE CRUX

Lifting the icy layers off Antarctica

reveals high mountains and low
valleys — many below sea level.

10 DISCOVERMAGAZINE.COM
 BIG IDEA the seafoor. Sean Gulick of the
University of Texas, Shevenell’s
colleague, recalled seeing similar

The Sleeping Giant

features off the coast of Alaska.
These channels form when warm air
melts surface ice and creates rivers
of runoff that tunnel through the
East Antarctica, long thought stable, is drawing fresh attention. ice and carve the underlying rock
en route to the ocean. That requires
temperatures above freezing, a
ALONG ANTARCTICA’S west coast glacier in East Antarctica, called relative rarity across much of the
near the Amundsen Sea, great white Totten, would unleash almost as much southern continent.
glaciers the size of U.S. states slowly sea level rise as melting the entire “That was completely unex-
slide into the ocean. In the early ’80s, West Antarctic Ice Sheet. Satellite pected,” Shevenell says.
scientists dubbed it the continent’s data already show Totten Glacier is Their fnding comes as scientists
“weak underbelly” after learning that melting faster than any other in East notice more surface melt across
ice here — which helps hold back the Antarctica. And a recent study hinted Antarctica: Last year, two Nature
entire West Antarctic Ice Sheet — is at why: Far more of the glacier foats studies showed it’s more com-
anchored below sea level. on warming ocean water than scientists mon than suspected. By sifting
If oceans warmed, this unfortunate thought. through decades of aerial and
topography could cause rapid and To fnd out more, Shevenell and a satellite photos, a team from
irreversible retreat. In decades past, large interdisciplinary team Columbia University’s
glaciologists had assumed these ancient sailed as close as they could Lamont-Doherty Earth
features advanced and retreated on epic to the glacier’s mouth — a A startling Observatory discovered
time scales — not in human lifetimes. coastline where sea ice string of new some 700 drainage sys-
Ever since, climatologists have been freezes against grounded tems across the continent.
spellbound watching the rapid changes. icebergs. The captain had
evidence has They range from streams
We now know that melting the whole to turn around their vessel scientists and ponds to 400-foot-
West Antarctic Ice Sheet could cause after nearly freezing into the questioning wide waterfalls.
15 feet of global sea level rise. And ice. But they still managed Shevenell suspects
that’s galvanized the scientifc com- to deploy a suite of scientifc their Totten got a one-two
munity, leading to a new $50 million instruments to probe the assumptions. punch — warm ocean
joint U.S.-U.K. project to predict ice region’s past. water lapped at its under-
melt rates. One goal was to study side as hot air melted the
Meanwhile, Antarctica’s other gla- sediment layers below the seafoor. By surface. But she can’t be sure without
ciers have drawn far less attention, even bouncing seismic signals off the sea more data. So her team is working
though if East Antarctica melted, it bed beneath their ship, the team gained on a project to return to the glacier
would raise global sea levels by a whop- a sort of “X-ray view.” and drill down into the scarred
ping 174 feet. Thankfully, its glaciers They saw the bottom layers, which sediments to more precisely date
sit largely above sea level, where they date back more than 34 million the glacier’s moves. They’ll better
should be safe for hundreds or thou- years — to a hotter Earth, before unravel when Totten retreated and
sands of years — at least that’s been continental-scale ice sheets covered advanced, and why it’s so sensitive to
the traditional thinking. But a startling the region. Then, higher up in the climate change. But the project won’t
string of new evidence, gathered from sediment, pebbles marked the arrival be easy. The logistics of working in
feld expeditions, as well as air- and of debris-toting icebergs. These kinds this environment could require drill-
space-based observations, has scientists of sediment changes revealed glaciers ing technologies not yet invented.
questioning their assumptions. retreating and advancing on 11 For their team, the risk and
“East Antarctica is the sleeping separate occasions. expense are well worth it to uncover
giant,” says Amelia Shevenell of the Their results hint at ice melt when secrets from an overlooked part
University of South Florida, who’s Earth’s temperatures and carbon of the continent. “I think it is a
studied the continent up close eight dioxide levels resembled predictions for complete oversight, and we’ve been
MARTIN KÜNSTING

times since 1995. “We don’t really the not-too-distant future. saying this for years,” Shevenell says.
understand it.” And the group spotted something Now that’s fnally starting to change.
Melting just one nearly France-sized else, too: Massive channels scar  ERIC BETZ

September 2018 DISCOVER 11

THE CRUX
TOOLS OF THE TRADE

A Heavenly Disk
How to turn one telescope into hundreds.

NO, IT’S NOT AN ALIEN

ARTIFACT. Since 1998,
the Sloan Digital Sky
Survey (SDSS) has used
thousands of metal
disks like this — called
plug plates — to map
the universe. Workers
called plate pluggers
clamp these disks atop
a 2.5-meter telescope
in New Mexico, after
threading optical cables
into the hundreds of
holes. Each one lines
up with the light from
a known galaxy or star.
This creates, in effect,
an armada of tiny
telescopes, each hyper-
focused on a single
celestial sight.
Now in its fourth
phase, SDSS has mapped
the Milky Way in 3D,
surveyed millions of
nearby galaxies, and
more. It’s like Google
Earth for the cosmos.
Along the way, the
plates themselves have
become iconic, recycled
into coffee tables,
museum pieces, even
fine art sculptures. But
soon they’ll all be relics.
Starting in 2020, SDSS-V
will use mini robots to
aim optical cables at the
sky, charting our cosmic
metropolis faster than
WILLIAM ZUBACK/DISCOVER

ever before.  ERIC BETZ

12 DISCOVERMAGAZINE.COM
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THE CRUX
ReDISCOVER
Pyramid Dreams
Checking in with the man who says he discovered an advanced ancient civilization.
IN 2008, Discover profiled amateur
archaeologist Sam Osmanagich, who
claimed to have discovered the oldest
and largest pyramids in the world.
Located near the Bosnian city of Visoko
and billed as “the most monumental
construction complex ever built on the
face of the planet,” the pyramids were
allegedly made by a highly advanced
civilization some 12,000 years ago.
While Osmanagich had no evidence,
he did gather worldwide media atten-
tion, hundreds of volunteers aiding his
excavation and legions of visitors to his
so-called “pyramid valley.” The Bosnian
government was thrilled with the boost
in tourism and national pride, both
welcome after the devastating Bosnian
war of 1992-95. Osmanagich was a
national hero.
The only problem was that the experts
didn’t believe him. In 2006, the European
Association of Archaeologists wrote an
open letter to the Bosnian government
denouncing the pyramids as a “cruel
hoax on an unsuspecting public.”
Pyramid souvenirs are for sale (above) in the
central Bosnian town of Visoko, depicting
the structure amateur archaeologist Sam
Osmanagich promises is nearby. While some
of the hills do resemble pyramids (right),
experts believe they’re natural formations.
14 DISCOVERMAGAZINE.COM
What little credibility
he may have had then is
gone now: Ten years later,
Osmanagich makes even more
outlandish claims. He says the
largest pyramid is clad in con-
crete superior to modern build-
ing materials, and sits over the
most extensive underground
network of tunnels ever discov-
ered. This labyrinth purportedly features
ceramic sculptures weighing several tons,
the largest known in the ancient world.
Osmanagich also says he knows
why the Bosnian pyramids were built.
He claims they are energy amplifiers,
capable of improving health and pro-
longing life — as well as communicat-
ing with “torsion fields” that travel
much faster than the speed of light.
Naturally, these remarkable feats could
be achieved only by a society far ahead
of our own. “They knew energy sources
and frequencies better than we do, and
how clean and free energy can be pro-
duced,” Osmanagich says.
EUROPE
Visoko
BOSNIA AND
HERZEGOVINA
Experts, of
course, don’t
buy it. “All
of the ‘finds’
being made by
Osmanagich are
either natural
features like rocks, or the result of long
occupation in these valleys by people
since the Greco-Roman period,” says
Boston University archaeologist Curtis
Runnels. “As for the supernatural powers
he claims for these ‘pyramids,’ one only
has to note that Mr. Osmanagich pub-
lished a book claiming the Maya came
from the Pleiades constellation.”
So while Osmanagich hasn’t discov-
ered an ancient civilization with the
secret to long life and free energy, he’s
found something arguably more valu-
able. In the hills of Visoko, he’s uncov-
ered a mechanism for generating free
publicity.  JONATHON KEATS
FROM LEFT: DANILO KRSTANOVIC/REUTERS; COURTESY OF SAM OSMANAGICH
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COLD CALCULATION
Quantum computers operate on units of information called qubits, instead of a classic
binary computer’s bits. But they make mistakes when exposed to heat. So IBM built
this gold-plated device, called a dilution refrigerator, to cool its 50-qubit processor
to a temperature of just a fraction above absolute zero. When properly chilled, the
processor can crunch massive numbers in lightning-fast time and solve extraordinarily
complex problems that would bog down traditional computers.  ERNIE MASTROIANNI;
PHOTO BY GRAHAM CARLOW

September 2018 DISCOVER 15

THE CRUX
TRENDING Building Blocks
A New Measure of Aging?
If you’ve read anything about aging, the term
telomere might sound familiar. Telomeres are
the caps at the ends of DNA strands, protecting the
genetic instructions from damage throughout our
lives. Previous work has indicated telomeres act as
The Big Picture a biological clock: The shorter they
become, the shorter your remaining
Want to stay busy? Breakdown of All Life (in Gigatons of Carbon) life span. But a new review paper
Try taking a head published in Trends in Cell
count of all the life Biology suggests telomeres
archaea might not be our only aging
on Earth. That’s 7 clock. Each cell has a central
what researchers
viruses plants nucleus that houses DNA, and
from the Weizmann 450 at the center of the nucleus is
0.2
Institute of Science something called a nucleolus.
in Israel and the Here, protein-makers known as
California Institute ribosomes are created. It seems the
of Technology did, smaller the nucleolus, the longer our
picking through protists life span. Experts still don’t know why
4 animals this is, but the realization could lead to exciting
hundreds of studies
to conduct a global 2 work in the future.
bacteria fungi
census. They dug 70
up some interesting
12 An Outsider in Our Midst
Floating out there in our Milky Way is an asteroid
stuff: Of the
named (514107) 2015 BZ509, or Bee-Zed for short. It
approximately 550 hangs out around Jupiter, and a few years ago, it
gigatons of carbon Breakdown of Animals caught the attention of astronomers. That’s because
(Gt C) life that nematodes compared with most other celestial bodies in our
inhabits our planet, 0.02 solar system, Bee-Zed orbits the sun in the opposite
plants take up the mollusks direction. This quirk spurred researchers to further
0.2 worms and investigate the oddball. By simulating the past
biggest chunk,
other annelids
accounting for trajectories of 1 million so-called clone asteroids
arthropods 0.2
450 Gt C. The team based on Bee-Zed’s current orbit, the
1 wild birds team discovered the space rock
also found that the 0.002 originally hails from what’s called

CLOCKWISE FROM LEFT: YINON M. BAR-ON, ROB PHILLIPS, RON MILO/PNAS MAY 21, 2018; PASIEKA/SCIENCE SOURCE; NASA/JPL
combined biomass of
the interstellar medium, the
humans and livestock fish space between star systems. The
far outweighs the 0.7 finding hints that there could be
biomass of wild livestock other foreign asteroids in our
0.1 wild mammals
mammals, pointing aquatic solar system, which means we’d
0.007
to the impact our invertebrates need to reevaluate what we
species has had on called cnidarians humans think we know about how our
the biosphere. 0.1 0.06 solar system came to be.
Source: “The biomass distribution on Earth,” Proceedings of the National Academy
of Sciences, 2018 A Killer Combo
Cystic fibrosis is a progressive disorder that
has no cure. A genetic mutation causes the buildup
of mucus in organs like the lungs and pancreas —
the perfect breeding ground for bacteria. What’s
more, the mucus creates a protective biofilm around
the bacteria, making bacterial infections in people
with cystic fibrosis hard to fight. But a recent study
published in Antimicrobial Agents and Chemotherapy
described a potential way to combat those infections.
It turns out that a combination of an antibacterial
substance called triclosan — commonly found in
toothpaste — and tobramycin, an FDA-approved
antibiotic drug, kills up to 99.9 percent of the biofilm
cells. Now that researchers know the combo works
in the lab, they hope to move on to testing in mouse
models in the next year.

16 DISCOVERMAGAZINE.COM
 Seeing Clearly
The average human brain houses
around 86 billion neurons, so crafting
a 3D map of those connections is no
small task. Sometimes researchers
deconstruct the brain into thousands
of thin slices — a tedious approach
that can end up distorting the image.
LI KA SHING FACULTY OF MEDICINE, THE UNIVERSITY OF HONG KONG

But more and more often, researchers

are using another option called tissue
clearing: It transforms opaque cells
into transparent ones, making it easier
to spot the connections scientists
are looking for. Now, researchers at
the University of Hong Kong have
developed a new variation of the
technique that can consistently detail
neuronal connections in samples. Here,
a computer has assigned colors to
these mouse cells — the warmer the
color, the deeper they are in the brain.

September 2018 DISCOVER 17

 Vital
Signs
Tongue Twister
A 70-year-old man loses his language overnight.
BY ELIEZER J. STERNBERG
→ Paul arrives at the emergency
department by ambulance.
Paramedics wheel in the 70-year-old
on a stretcher and help him sit on
the edge of a bed. He’s wearing an
oversized T-shirt and paint-splotched
pants. His arms are crossed, and he’s
18 DISCOVERMAGAZINE.COM
staring at his shoes, as if giving the
room the silent treatment.
Paul speaks no English, only
Portuguese. Through a translator, he
says with a sneer that his wife, Janet,
called the ambulance. “I am fne,” he
says. “You need to let me go home.”
He curses in Portuguese.
Since yesterday, Paul has been
acting strangely and has seemed
confused, alarming Janet. This
morning, she called from work
to check on him and couldn’t
understand a word he was saying.
“He was talking funny,” she says
in English. She called 911.
Confusion can happen for a lot
of reasons, such as head trauma,
stroke, seizure, drugs, infections,
blood pressure changes or electrolyte
disturbances like low sodium.
Anything that makes you sick
can make you confused.
Paul speaks no
English, only
Portuguese. Trough
a translator, he says
with a sneer that his
wife, Janet, called the
ambulance. “I am
fne,” he says. “You
need to let me go
home.” He curses in
Portuguese.
My frst challenge is to determine
what parts of Paul’s cognition have
been affected. I perform a complete
neurological exam. Everything
is normal.
When no cause is obvious, it’s
helpful to talk with friends and family
who know a patient well. They might
have noticed behavioral changes that
can help with making a diagnosis.
When Paul sees Janet, he starts
yelling at her in Portuguese. The
interpreter is in another room, so I
MHJ/ISTOCK
ask Janet to translate. But she can’t
help me.
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 Vital
Signs
“You don’t speak Portuguese?”
“No,” she says, “and Paul rarely
does. Paul speaks English.”
A DIFFERENT TONGUE
Paul has spoken English fuently
for 50 years. He came to America
from Portugal as a teenager. He
earned an undergraduate degree
at an American university and
wrote his master’s thesis in English.
Before today, he spoke Portuguese
only during occasional phone
conversations with family in
Portugal.
I immediately suspect aphasia, a
medical term for the loss of language
ability due to brain damage. The
main types are expressive aphasia, or
trouble speaking due to damage to
the brain’s frontal lobe, and receptive
aphasia, trouble understanding
language because of damage to the
temporal lobe. Aphasia is often seen
in patients with late-stage dementia,
but when the condition happens
suddenly, stroke is the usual culprit.
We roll Paul to the MRI suite to
scan his brain. It shows no structural
damage to brain tissue, no evidence
of a stroke.
On rare occasions, migraines cause
aphasia, but symptoms typically
last less than an hour. Paul’s aphasia
has lasted at least a few hours at this
point.
Another possibility is that Paul
had a seizure. Most people think of
seizures as full-body convulsions,
known as a generalized seizure.
Another type, called a focal seizure,
arises from a particular brain region
without affecting the rest of the
cerebral cortex.
Paul’s aphasia could be explained
by seizures in the language
areas of his frontal or temporal
lobes. To check, we order an
electroencephalogram (EEG), which
records electrical activity in the
brain and displays it on a monitor.
The data can then be analyzed
20 DISCOVERMAGAZINE.COM
for abnormal activity suggestive “Well, we’ve been arguing a lot
of seizures. But the EEG comes over the past few days. He’s just been
back normal. so stressed lately.”
Stress is normal. Everyone
SYMPTOMS OF STRESS experiences it. But in rare cases,
Could Paul be faking it? Janet raises stress can be a manifestation of brain
the question. They’ve been arguing damage. Just as there is a brain circuit
a lot; perhaps he’s acting out to for language, there’s one for emotion,
punish her. called the limbic system. Damage to
“It’s possible,” I say, “but why won’t the limbic system can cause anxiety
he speak English to the rest of us?” and agitation. Overnight, it can turn
It isn’t adding up. If he’s faking,
Paul’s performance is too perfect to
be believed. He would have slipped
up by now, accidentally responding
to an instruction in English, his
primary language for half a century.
I’m convinced his sudden aphasia
is not an act, yet the tests for acute
causes of his condition are negative.
What if the onset of Paul’s loss of
What disease spreads in a matter of days?
A stroke or seizure shows symptoms in minutes.
At the other end of the scale, chronic
degenerative diseases like Alzheimer’s take
years to develop. Infections and autoimmune
disease symptoms fall between those
two extremes.
English was not sudden, but gradual? a relaxed person into someone who is
Family and friends often are wrong angry and contentious.
about when a patient’s symptoms Paul and Janet have seldom
began. It’s not their fault: Many argued during their 40 years of
chronic diseases progress slowly, and marriage. But, Janet says, just days
symptoms often aren’t noticeable ago, something changed. “It came
until they hit a tipping point. But if out of nowhere,” she adds.
you press them to recall someone’s While Paul’s switch to Portuguese
subtle behavioral changes, they may developed overnight, it was
remember something that hints at an preceded by a change in his
earlier onset of symptoms. behavior that lasted days — his
When I ask Janet about changes language switch and agitation
over the past year to Paul’s memory, must be related. But it’s not simply
language or behavior, she comes the proximity in timing. It’s also
up empty. the proximity of brain anatomy:
“What about over the past few Located deep within the temporal
MHJ/ISTOCK
weeks or days? Anything out of lobe, the limbic system sits right
the ordinary?” beside our language circuitry.
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 Vital
Signs
Because the language circuitry
depends on the proper functioning
of the limbic system and because
of their close proximity, an illness
affecting one system could easily
affect the other.
What disease spreads in a matter
of days? A stroke or seizure shows
symptoms in minutes. At the other
end of the scale, chronic degenerative
diseases like Alzheimer’s take years to
develop. Infections and autoimmune
disease symptoms fall between those
two extremes.
Damage to
the limbic system
can cause anxiety
and agitation.
Overnight, it can
turn a relaxed
person into someone
who is angry and
contentious.
We decide to do a lumbar puncture,
or spinal tap. We draw cerebrospinal
fuid (CSF) from the lower back
with a needle. When the brain is
infamed or infected, the CSF teems
with immune cells or pathogens.
By testing the CSF, we can fnd the
infammation or identify the bug.
We perform the procedure and test
the fuid.
Indeed, Paul has an infection: the
herpes virus.
HERPES IN THE BRAIN
Herpes is a sexually transmitted
disease that lies dormant in many
people. When active, it can manifest
as cold sores around the mouth. On
rare occasions, the virus infects the
nervous system. It colonizes the deep
temporal lobe, setting the emotional
22 DISCOVERMAGAZINE.COM
Lymbic
system (red)
Language
center (green)
Problem in the temporal lobe
Paul’s limbic system, responsible for basic emotions and memory, and one
of his brain’s language centers (dark green) became infected with a virus,
causing him to become argumentative and unable to speak English.
circuitry ablaze in a condition known
as limbic encephalitis, which can
cause aphasia as the disease spreads.
That’s what happened to Paul.
The virus frst infected his limbic
system, causing him stress that
manifested as arguments with his
wife. As Paul slept, the virus likely
attacked his temporal lobe, running
rampant through his language
circuitry. By morning, he could speak
only Portuguese.
In rare cases, aphasia affects
bilingual people by knocking out
only one language. A person’s
native language, which is the frst
one they learn, has brain circuits
more entrenched and developed
than languages learned later in life.
If only a small amount of brain
tissue is damaged, as it was in Paul’s
case, the native language can be
spared while the second language
is snuffed out.
After admitting Paul to the
hospital, we treated him with
acyclovir, the antiviral agent typically
Language
center
(dark green)
Temporal
lobe (blue)
used for herpes. Over his 21-day
hospital stay, Paul’s mood and his
English got dramatically better. He
had no memory of being unable to
speak English; the limbic system
also includes the hippocampus,
the memory center. It’s common
for people who have experienced
this condition not to remember
the episode.
Weeks after Paul was released from
the hospital, I saw him and Janet
in my offce. She was elated by her
husband’s progress. After witnessing
their fghts, I was struck by how well
they got along. There was no sign
of confict. Janet told me the key is
effective communication. She looked
to Paul for confrmation.
“Of course; it’s why we never fght,”
he said.
Janet smiled at me. “Almost never.” D
CORBAC40/SHUTTERSTOCK
Eliezer J. Sternberg is a neurologist at Yale
New Haven Hospital. The cases described in
Vital Signs are real, but names and certain
details have been changed.
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 Mind
Over
Matter
What a Coincidence
What’s really going on when we encounter uncanny connections?
BY AMY PATUREL
1 2
3 at the University of Virginia, and a
4
→ It was just a few days shy of
my frst Thanksgiving without
my dad — at least as I’d known him.
He’d had heart surgery in January 2017,
followed by complications ranging
from strokes to a life-threatening
bacterial infection. The repeated
assaults on his system transformed
him. Last Thanksgiving, he had run
circles around my 3-year-old. This year,
he sat motionless in a chair, unable to
spoon his own mashed potatoes.
I needed a distraction. So I hit eBay
in search of a license plate for my
boys’ transportation-themed bedroom.
I decided to look for a Massachusetts
plate, because I spent a lot of time there
with my dad.
When the frst one popped up,
the numbers nearly leapt off my
screen. It was a 1938 plate, the same
year my dad was born, with the
numbers 143264. My mom was born in
February (2) of 1943, and they married
in 1964. I contacted the seller, who told
me the plate was part of his father’s
24 DISCOVERMAGAZINE.COM
4
6 everyone and everything. Beitman
He says it’s
synchronicities,
indicators of an
invisible network that
connects everyone
and everything.
vintage collection. He had thousands
of them.
“I lost my dad last December, after a
10-year battle with Parkinson’s disease,”
he wrote. “He was my best friend.
Every time I box up a plate, it kills me,
but I do it for my son and nephew’s
college fund.”
Was it a coincidence that almost all
of the numbers lined up with different
aspects of my parents’ lives? That the
seller and I shared a yearning for dads
who were no longer there? The majority
of scientists say it’s simple mathematics.
Some researchers subscribe to the
fringe claim that invisible forces “make
things happen.” But most camps agree
such scenarios are part of our brain’s
innate need to create order out of
chaos — and we experience them more
often when we’re paying attention.
WE ARE ALL CONNECTED
Stumbling upon that 1938 plate at
the moment I was missing my dad
— and the fact that the plate led me
to someone who was also missing his
dad — isn’t a coincidence. At least
according to psychiatrist Bernard
Beitman, a visiting psychiatry and
neurobehavioral sciences professor
coincidence researcher.
He says it’s synchronicities, indicators
of an invisible network that connects
suspects humans transmit some
unobserved energetic information,
which other people then process or
organize into emotion and behavior.
“Just as sharks have ampullae in their
skin that detect small electromagnetic
changes to help them locate their prey
… it’s plausible, maybe even probable,
that humans have similar mechanisms
that detect coincidences,” he says.
There’s no evidence for this, but he’s
not the frst one to pursue this fringe
line of thinking. Austrian biologist
Paul Kammerer believed coincidences
arise out of unknown forces, or waves,
that he called seriality. He wrote a
book on the subject in 1919. Albert
Einstein even commented on it, saying
it was “by no means absurd.” And in
the 1950s, psychiatrist Carl Jung came
up with a similar idea, his so-called
synchronicity theory, to describe these
bizarre occurrences.
The most pervasive argument,
though, may be a combination of our
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and plain ol’ math.
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 Mind
Over
Matter
that coincidences are “an inevitable
consequence of the mind searching
for causal structure in reality.” That
search for structure is a mechanism
that allows us to learn and adapt
to our environment.
The very defnition of coincidence
relies on us picking out similarities
and patterns. “Once we spot a
regularity, we learn something about
what events go together and how
likely they are to occur,” says Magda
Osman, an experimental psychologist
at the University of London and one
of the study’s authors. “And these are
valuable sources of information to
begin to navigate the world.”
But it’s not only recognizing the
pattern that makes a coincidence.
It’s also the meaning we ascribe to
it — especially meaning that provides
solace or clarifcation. So when we see
an unusual confguration, we think it
must hold some signifcance, that it
must be special. Yet most statisticians
argue that unlikely occurrences
happen frequently because there are
so many opportunities for surprising
events to happen. “It’s chance,” says
David Spiegelhalter, a risk researcher
at the University of Cambridge.
Spiegelhalter collects anecdotes
of coincidences. In fact, he’s
accumulated more than 5,000 stories
since 2012 as part of an ongoing
project. In 2016, an independent
data frm analyzed these stories and
revealed 28 percent of them involve
dates and numbers. But no matter
what the nature of a coincidence is,
Spiegelhalter claims coincidences
are in the eye of the beholder.
A classic example: In a room of
23 people, there’s just over a 50/50
chance two of them will share
a birthday. Most of us would view
that as an inexplicable coincidence,
but mathematical law suggests
such events are random and bound
to happen. Any meaning we attribute
to them is all in our heads.
Take the tale of my license plate and
26 DISCOVERMAGAZINE.COM
Connect With
Coincidence
Certain people are more coincidence-
prone than others, but all of us can
learn how to cultivate them. “The more
you notice the events, the more they
happen,” says mathematician David
Hand. Want the world to feel like a more
magical place? Try these strategies:
1. Pay attention. Coincidences happen
to people who are mindful and notice
things. When you go about your daily
activities, keep your senses open to
coincidental opportunities.
2. Talk to strangers. According to work
by risk researcher David Spiegelhalter,
coincidences often arise out of talking
to someone you don’t know. If you don’t
introduce yourself to your neighbor, you
can’t possibly know both of you were
born in the same hospital, on the same
day, in a city several hundred miles away
from your current homes.
3. Seek meaning. Whether you see
a string of numbers on a license plate
or hear a song on the radio, ask yourself
if you can make meaning out of
the experience.
4. Write it down. Keep a log of the
coincidences that occur in your daily
life. The more you notice coincidences,
the more likely they are to happen to
you. — A.P.
how the numbers jumped out at me.
“Had it instead been the full date of
your father’s birth, or your mother’s, or
your own, or some other combination
of these, then you would still have
thought it striking,” says David
Hand, a mathematics professor at the
Imperial College London and author
of The Improbability Principle: Why
Coincidences, Miracles and Rare Events
Happen Every Day. “The point is, there
are lots of ways an interesting number
could arise. If any of these ‘lots of
ways’ would make you take notice, then
it’s not so unusual after all.”
And as Beitman pointed out,
my plate also came with a rub:
Where does the number 1 on the plate
ft in? I reasoned it’s from the month
of my dad’s birth (October, or 10)
— or maybe, as a romantic, I could
decode 143 as short hand for “I love
you” because of the number of letters
in each word.
But 1 isn’t 10, and 143 could, with
my logic, mean other things, like “I hate
you.” “And that’s the predisposition of
those who want to see a coincidence,”
Beitman says. “The brain sees a pattern
that does not exist.”
CULTIVATING COINCIDENCE
Regardless of what triggers
coincidences, research suggests they’re
more likely to happen to certain
people. “People who describe
themselves as religious or spiritual,
those who are more connected with
the world around them and those
who are seeking meaning — or
in distress and searching for signs
— are more likely to experience
coincidences,” Beitman says. Back
in 2002, researchers published a
study in Perceptual and Motor Skills
noting that people who are more
likely to be surprised by coincidences
are also more likely to believe in
the paranormal.
So perhaps it’s not surprising
I homed in on that plate. I was
emotional, missing my dad, and I do
hold strong paranormal beliefs. Had
the seller shared my dad’s birthday,
I would have likely felt that, too, was an
uncanny coincidence. And admittedly,
when I asked my husband and sister if
they recognized the plate as destined
for me, both were stumped. They didn’t
see the sequence as anything unique.
The irony of my story? Through a
comedy of errors involving insuffcient
knowledge of eBay logistics and
a busy holiday weekend, I lost the
auction. Channeling my dad’s fghting
spirit, I contacted the winner through
the seller. The 1938 Massachusetts
plate is now on my boys’ wall. D
Amy Paturel is a health and science writer
based in Murrieta, California.
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 COVER STORY

TECH
EXPLOSION
How nuclear
weapons are
sparking a
DIGITAL
REVOLUTION
ZENOBILLIIS/SHUTTERSTOCK

September 2018 DISCOVER 29

THE
NUCLEAR
OPTIONS
The
Manhattan
Project never
ended. A new
Cold War of
1s and 0s is
reshaping
science and
society.
BY ERIC BETZ

30 DISCOVERMAGAZINE.COM
 The bomb arrived in pieces. Workers assembled the
device behind steel-reinforced concrete walls in the des-
ert, mating radioactive materials with high explosives. It
was called Kearsarge.
And on a hot August day in 1988, a crew lowered the
bomb through a hole drilled thousands of feet into the
Nevada Test Site, then entombed it beneath millions of
pounds of sand.
Thirty miles away, Los Alamos Director Siegfried Hecker
sat nervously in the control room. Seven top Soviet
nuclear scientists watched intently. What if the bomb
fizzled, Hecker thought. What happens to America’s
nuclear deterrent?
Officials had negotiated this Joint Verification
Experiment for years. The United States and Soviet
Union had long conducted test explosions of the big-
ger weapons in their arsenals, both to make sure they
really worked and as a show of force. The adversaries
were willing to permanently stop blowing up the big-
gest bombs, but first scientists needed a way to verify
violations. Each country would test its monitoring tech-
niques on the other side’s bomb. If today’s nuclear test
went well, it might be among the last.
The detonation order went out. Kearsarge exploded
with 10 times more energy than Hiroshima. Vital signs
from the bomb raced up cables as they vaporized. One
hundred thousand raw data points fed into comput-
ers, eventually confirming theory with reality. The
earth shook. Ninety miles away in Las Vegas, lamps
danced over pool tables at the Tropicana. (See “How a
Nuke Works,” page 33.)
Oh, thank God, Hecker thought. Later, his Soviet coun-
terpart congratulated him over lunch. Their eyes met. It
OPPOSITE: KELLIE JAEGER/DISCOVER

was like looking in the mirror. “The world . . . would never

be the same,” says Hecker, whose job was first held by
Robert Oppenheimer, father of the atomic bomb.
In the years that followed, the Cold War would end,
and so would the days of shaking the desert.

September 2018 DISCOVER 31

 By 1992, President George H.W. Bush reluctantly
signed a nine-month moratorium on nuclear weapons
tests. For generations, mutual assured destruction had
been the cornerstone of military might. Testing showed
the world that a nuclear strike, by anyone, would be
suicide. Without it, scientists needed a new way to
prove America’s arsenal was safe and reliable. They had
intended the bombs to last only 10 to 15 years — and
some were already decades old. And because scientists
had long depended on explosive tests over theoretical
models, they didn’t fully understand the physics of the
bombs. Now they’d have to predict how aging radioac-
tive components might change the performance of a
geriatric weapon.
High-performance computers had been a staple at
weapons labs since the Manhattan Project in the 1940s.
So to scientists, they were the obvious way forward. If
they couldn’t blow up nukes anymore, scientists would
simulate the detonations. But frst, they’d need comput-
ers 10,000 times faster than any the world had seen. The
labs that invented the Atomic Age had to fast forward
the digital age.
And now, amid rising geopolitical tensions, nuclear
weapons designers are once again trying to spark a new
technological revolution. The U.S. is spending
$1 trillion to modernize its aging nuclear
weapons arsenal, from subs and jets to revi-
talized warheads, with billions more dollars
spent on pushing the limits of supercomput-
ing. Old competitions have been renewed.
And a new rival has emerged: China. As
the two superpowers race to build the frst
machine as powerful as the human brain,
they’ll also help improve weather forecasts
and medical treatments. But, as in the past
two decades, that new technology will emerge
in service of the true goal: refurbishing and
maintaining our nuclear bombs.

A BOOMLESS BOMB

TOP: OMIKRON/SCIENCE SOURCE. BOTTOM: LOS ALAMOS NATIONAL LABORATORY/SCIENCE SOURCE

America’s modern nuclear program is the
brainchild of an engineer-turned-bureaucrat
named Vic Reis. He ran the Defense Advanced
Research Projects Agency (DARPA) — the
military’s research agency — under President
Bush, and then in 1993 President Bill Clinton tapped
him to oversee defense research at the Department of
Energy. With the former Soviet Union in shambles,
a debate raged over the bomb’s future. The weapons
labs and military wanted to resume testing, but others
wanted to extend the ban forever.
In an unassuming memo, Reis proposed a middle
ground. The way he saw it, America had already exploded
1,000 nuclear bombs. A few more wouldn’t reveal much
about existing weapons. The important thing, to stay
ahead militarily, was to create a program that truly chal-
lenged the labs. Maintaining a deterrent would require
An above-ground nuclear bomb test in 1957 (top) and a field of
craters left over from underground detonations, both in Yucca
Flat, Nevada, demonstrate America’s propensity for nuclear testing
during the Cold War. Nowadays, scientists test new weapons and
maintain the old ones via computers and simulations.
scientifc superiority. Reis called the new program Science
Based Stockpile Stewardship. If nuclear weapons research
wasn’t based on physical tests, then what?
To fgure it out, Reis rallied top scientists and directors
from the three weapons labs — Los Alamos and Sandia
in New Mexico, and Lawrence Livermore. They gath-
ered around a whiteboard and started to build the new
testless program. Funding levels would stay the same
as they were with nuclear testing, roughly $4 billion to

32 DISCOVERMAGAZINE.COM
 $5 billion per year, but instead they’d take turns building
the world’s largest computers and only pretend to blow
up bombs. As a result, all our nuclear tests since 1992
have been simulated ones.
But not everyone approved. Many old-school scien-
tists didn’t think computer models could replace tests.
The very idea violated basic notions of the scientifc
method — hypothesize and test. “Our weapons designers
were extremely skeptical, even to the point of being very
negative,” Hecker says. “As the director, I had to come in
Casing protects
and say, ‘Well that’s just too damn bad.’ ” the bomb’s
Bob Webster, who runs Los Alamos’ weapons pro- innards
gram, says real-life testing had made it comparatively
Electric
easy to study bombs at the right temperature, density, signals trigger
pressure and more. So even with computer-only blasts, conventional
explosives
they’d need physical experiments — including explo-
sives and multibillion-dollar laser facilities — to feed Lensed
explosives aim
real numbers into their simulations, and to use as a inward, starting
check on their results. an implosion
The approach was a daunting one. “It wasn’t clear
A pusher
it would work,” Webster says. The weapons labs would smooths
be tasked with certifying the stockpile was healthy each blast waves as
they condense
year. If a specifc weapons system had major problems, the pit
the nation might have to retire it, or scramble to rebuild
Uranium or
the nuclear facilities that make it — even resume testing plutonium pits
in an extreme scenario. start a chain
reaction
There were two major hurdles: We still didn’t really
understand plutonium, and we didn’t have enough com- A tamper helps
putational horsepower. contain the
reaction as it
grows bigger
IT’S ELEMENTAL
Plutonium doesn’t exist in nature. Humans invented
it in the 1940s, and harnessing the deadly metal was
perhaps the Manhattan Project’s greatest challenge.
Oppenheimer called it a “terrible substance.” It’s such a
tricky material to work with, his scientists struggled even
to agree on its density. “Plutonium is by far the most
complicated element on the periodic table,” Hecker says.
No one knew what happened to plutonium as it ages,
and that meant no one knew how long our nuclear
weapons would work. It’s not just a matter of replacing
it, either, because America’s only plutonium factory
stopped production in 1989 after toxic waste leaks. And
plutonium wasn’t the only thing getting older. Warheads
include a vast array of complex metals and electronic How a Nuke Works
Nuclear warheads are like avocados. They’re similarly shaped with
parts, any one of which could cause problems with age. an inner core, called a pit. The bomb’s typically grapefruit-sized pit
Weapons scientists charged with making sure the old is often hollow and lined with plutonium. Instead of delicious green
bombs still work compare their situation to storing a fruit surrounding it, the warhead has high explosives aimed inward,
vintage car for 40 years without ever starting it, but still to create an implosion. This squeezes the plutonium pit until it’s so
dense that particles start smashing into plutonium nuclei, literally
making sure it’d work on the frst turn of the key.
ALEX WELLERSTEIN/NUCLEARSECRECY.COM

splitting atoms and unleashing their incredible energy.

In the 1990s, researchers realized that answering all
their questions would require signifcant advances in
fundamental materials science and physics. To do that,
they’d need better computers to test how those aging
components alter a nuclear explosion — and they had
to be fast enough to spit out the answers in a useful time
frame, too. — Story continues on page 36
That simple design worked for Fat Man (above), detonated in
Nagasaki in 1945. But today’s stockpiled warheads are thermonuclear
devices, commonly called H-bombs because they use hydrogen. These
have a secondary stage — like a second pit next to the plutonium pit.
As the first pit erupts in a nuclear explosion, its radiation bounces off
the hardened shell of the second pit and reflects back inward. The
first blast ignites nuclear fusion within the secondary pit, making the
blast much bigger and more powerful. — E.B.

September 2018 DISCOVER 33

 Survival 101
Even at the Cold War’s peak —
with John F. Kennedy suggesting DOWNTOWN LA
families build fallout shelters
— many Americans doubted
we’d ever be nuked. And if it
happened, most assumed we’d RING 5
die in the global Armageddon.
So, how do you prepare RING 4
people for an improbable
and seemingly unsurvivable
disaster? That’s still a problem
RING 3
for emergency managers, says
Alex Wellerstein, a nuclear bomb
historian at the Stevens Institute
of Technology in New Jersey.
A couple of years ago, he RING 2
pitched a project to re-examine
how to talk to Americans about
preparedness and the risk of
nuclear threats. At first, his team
struggled to attract interest —
until 2017. After North Korea’s LONG BEACH
missile tests, suddenly even the
Federal Emergency Management
Agency was asking for training
help. But Americans — or their
government agencies — still
aren’t as prepared as they
should be.
Wellerstein hopes his study
can help. The goal isn’t to scare
people, he says. It’s to see
nuclear bombs as real things
rather than Hollywood stand-ins
for the apocalypse. And that
includes telling people that if
you’re beyond the main blast FIREBALL RING
radius, the biggest immediate The fireball spans some
threats you’ll face are windows 3,000 feet across in just
breaking and things falling off seconds, and million-
the ceiling. “Going under your degree temps vaporize
desk will probably [improve] everything in its path.
your chances of surviving
considerably,” he says. — E.B. RING 2
Radiation poisoning
kills at least half of
everything within this
ring. Death could take
Hollywood loves to blow up its hours or weeks.
hometown in disaster flicks.
But when the RAND Corporation, a RING 3 FIREBALL RING
non-profit think tank, studied the About 2 miles from the
consequences of a real-world nuclear epicenter, many people
attack, it found the aftermath extends
far beyond Tinseltown.
die, and virtually all
homes are leveled.
A nuclear blast at the nearby Port
of Long Beach — specifically, a
RING 4
150-kiloton explosion shown here Extreme heat sparks fires
BLAST IMAGE COMPONENTS: SHUTTERSTOCK

— kills some 60,000 instantly around that can merge into a

the critical global shipping center. But firestorm. Third-degree
chaos ensues as 6 million people flee burns are rampant, and
LA, global shipping finds new routes,
vegetation is charred.
insurance providers go under and the
West Coast searches for new gasoline RING 5
supplies.
More than 6 miles away,
heavy airburst gusts
shatter windows.
ILLUSTRATION BY ZACH BUSH

34 DISCOVERMAGAZINE.COM

WHAT TO DO
1. Don’t stare. Hit the
ground when you see
the flash. Blasts can level
buildings and shatter
windows. Desks are solid
places to hide in a pinch.
2. Shelter in place. Find
the building’s innermost
part. Maximize layers
between you and the
radiation. A basement is
great, if you have one.
3. Don’t go outside.
“That’s the way to die,”
Wellerstein says. Ignore
instincts to get the kids
from school: You could
get stuck in the fallout.
4. Store a few days’
worth of food and
water. No need to go all
doomsday prepper, just
have supplies to ride out
the radiation fallout.
5. Get out of town a few
days after the blast, or
once officials say it’s clear.
Millions would have to
evacuate Los Angeles
long term as the area
may be uninhabitable.
MUSHROOM CLOUD
The bomb’s iconic symbol
forms as newly hot
air expands and rises
quickly. Dirt and debris
rapidly get sucked in
with the air, like fire
feeding on oxygen. The
cloud spreads when it
hits less-dense air at high
altitude, creating the
mushroom cap.
PREVAILING WIND
After the blast and shock
wave, radioactive debris
falls back to Earth. Wind
direction will dictate
how many die from
radiation poisoning and,
eventually, cancer and
other disease.
BLACK RAIN
After the Hiroshima
and Nagasaki
bombings, atmospheric
currents mixed with
the firestorms and
radioactive particles,
causing devastating
radioactive rain.
HIGH COST
Experts say a nuclear
blast in the LA area could
cost taxpayers $1 trillion.
For comparison, the 9/11
cleanup cost $50 billion
to $100 billion.
September 2018 DISCOVER 35

Oak Ridge National Laboratory unveiled its
Summit supercomputer, which can make
3 billion billion calculations per second, in June.
Despite the back and forth, scientists
say it’s not a race. The world’s big ques-
tions — like, will our nukes still work?
— simply demand faster and faster
supercomputers. It’s a natural progres-
sion, not a competition. However,
those same experts will point out the
importance of being frst. And the pos-
sibilities go beyond improved nuclear
simulations.
“These computers help build things
and help answer questions and help
look into the future,” Dongarra says.
“If you have the fastest computer,
you’ll be able to do those things with
much faster turnaround.”
ONE BILLION BILLION
That’s why the two superpowers
are racing toward the next step
for supercomputers, called exas-
cale. These computers will make
1 billion billion calculations —
1,000,000,000,000,000,000 — every
second. The U.S. should have its frst
exascale computer online at Argonne
National Laboratory near Chicago in
2021, and China will likely also have
one around the same time. Either
country could be frst.
But over the past five years,
the Top500 list has revealed a troubling trend:
Supercomputers aren’t improving as quickly. For
OAK RIDGE NATIONAL LABORATORY
fve decades, chips have shrunk in half every 18 to
24 months. Now Moore’s law may fnally end. As
chips get smaller, running them gets more expensive.
Researchers say we’ve reached a technological turning
point like the one that transformed pipeline processors
into massively parallel machines two decades ago.
It can’t come soon enough for
nuclear weapons scientists and
researchers. John Sarrao oversees
some 700 nuclear weapons research-
ers as associate director for theory,
simulation and computation at Los
Alamos. He says scientists already
have problems that only an exascale
computer can solve.
For Sarrao, understanding plu-
tonium aging is high on the list. In
2007, a major report suggested the
plutonium in warheads should age
gracefully, lasting up to 85 to 100
years. But not all scientists agree.
Hecker, now a Stanford University
professor, led some of the last major
The Chain research into plutonium aging around
the time of that report. He disagreed
Saw, the with its conclusions, and now the
Beaver former lab director is volunteering at
and the Ant Los Alamos, working once again on
plutonium aging.
Supercomputer history
can fit into three eras, Sarrao hopes exascale comput-
says Horst Simon, deputy ers can help. Current computers
director of Lawrence still can’t run highly detailed plu-
Berkeley National tonium models that capture the
Laboratory. “If you want
to chop down the Amazon
element’s microstructure.
rainforest, you can have Exascale machines won’t just
one chain saw, 100 beavers, build better bombs, either. They’ll
or you can use 1 million simulate extremely fne-scale phe-
ants,” he says. nomena, like the intricacies of ocean
The chain saw represents
early supercomputers currents or blood fow through the
— expensive and high- body. Supercomputers even underpin
powered, but capable of weather models, so better tech means
only felling one tree at a better forecasts. These advances
time. Beavers work longer
eventually reach the public. Twenty
per tree, but chew on 100
simultaneously, so they’re years ago, Intel’s ASCI Red reigned
ultimately more productive. as the world’s fastest computer with
That’s the massively parallel its trillion calculations per second.
supercomputers, which Last year, Intel introduced a desktop
dominated until recently.
computer chip with that much power.
Now the industry is
pushing toward ants — If history repeats, the decades to
the tiny components of come will see an exascale computer
exascale computers. They’re in every pocket.
abundant, use little energy “Exascale is not the end of the
and can accomplish the
task more quickly. — E.B.
race,” Dongarra says. As long as the
Nevada Test Site remains quiet, and
simulated bombs are preferred to real
ones, scientists and governments will make sure com-
puting power keeps improving. “Who has the fastest
computer is something like a trophy on a mantel,” he
says. “The real question is what kind of science are we
doing on these things.” D
Eric Betz is an associate editor at Discover. His last feature looked
at using CRISPR in agriculture. Follow him on Twitter: @ericbetz
September 2018 DISCOVER 37
 SHALL WE PLAY A GAME?
Keeping track of the nuclear pieces. BY ERIC BETZ
AVANGARD
These Mach 20
missiles evade air
defenses and strike
“like a meteorite,”
BEAR Vladimir Putin
Iran China These says.
and North is now long-range prop-
DF-17 powered bombers
Korea draw developing a
China, like have served since the
headlines. But tensions stealthy long-range
Russia, is building ’50s, like America’s
are rising between bomber. Its existing
hypersonic missiles B-52s.
nuclear-armed adversaries models are built on Cold
to evade enemy
Pakistan and India. Each War-era tech licensed
defenses.
has 100-plus warheads from Russia’s Tu-16 jet,
poised to fire at the first built in the
other across the 1950s.
Himalayas.

India
has largely
prevailed in its four Russia’s
wars with Pakistan. As arsenal is
India grows more worried increasingly
about China, it’s been mobile, with
buying, licensing and ICBMs on trucks
leasing advanced jets, and even
bombers and subs — even trains.
an aircraft carrier —
from the U.S. and
Russia.

Pakistan
is building
tactical nuclear
The weapons — small KANYON
U.S. has warheads that could This 80-foot-
1960s-era B61 counteract India’s superior long, underwater
gravity bombs — conventional military stealth drone would
they fall straight might. China is aiding China’s pack a warhead more
down — deployed Pakistan’s nuclear unique “no powerful than any
at bases across ambitions. first use” policy ever tested: 100
Europe. means its weapons megatons.
aren’t on alert, and China
its stockpile is minimal recently
for deterrent. Yet tested a silent
MAP BACKGROUND BY ECKLER/SHUTTERSTOCK

China is now the only drive like the one

superpower in The Hunt for
increasing its Red October.
arsenal.
ILLUSTRATIONS: JAY SMITH;

Editor’s Note: This map shows highlights of the global nuclear arsenal,
and is not all-inclusive. It’s compiled from governmental and third-party
analysis, often gathered from satellite imagery. Nuclear assets may have
moved and new sites added.

38 DISCOVERMAGAZINE.COM
 SARMAT
An ICBM
to rule them The
all, “Satan 2” U.S., along
can launch with Russia and
multiple Avangard China, is racing to
hypersonic invent supersonic
nukes. cruise
missiles.

EXO-
B-21
ATMOSPHERIC
BOMBER INTERCEPTOR
KILL VEHICLE Its looks remain
Rockets launch it to DRONES
secret, but 100 of The U.S. is building
orbit, where it can
these brand-new stealth laser-toting UAVs
intercept and stop
bombers are headed for to shoot down
an ICBM.
U.S. bases. They should missiles.
sneak past Russian
defenses.

The
U.S. is
spending
$128 billion
on a new fleet
The of next-generation
U.S. always nuclear
Ronald submarines.
keeps a handful
Reagan’s
of Ohio-class subs
space-based
at sea. Each can
missile defense
fire up to 20
program, “Star Wars,”
Trident nuclear
proved infeasible.
missiles.
Modern defenses use
ground and sea
missiles.

COMBAT
LASER
A sci-fi style,
truck-mounted
laser cannon for
blasting down SHIP-
missiles. BASED Submarine Aircraft
INTERCEPTORS
Specially designed
Navy ships carry
intercept ICBM Mobile
missiles.

In Defense Testing
2018,
Russia claimed
DARPA it had sailed
is trying Radar Labs
nuclear subs off
to tap marine
the U.S. East Coast
creatures’ sensory
without being
systems for help
SEA detected. Production Ships
detecting
subs. HUNTER
This 130-foot-
long drone warship,
and more like it, ICBMs on Trains
will soon stalk
encroaching
subs. OUnited States
ORussia
OChina
OOther nuclear
nations
 How scientists discovered
a symphony under the sea.

BY HELEN SCALES
ILLUSTRATIONS BY MARCOS CHIN

September 2018 DISCOVER 41

ON THE FRINGES OF THE GULF STREAM, of the east coast
of Florida, the sea is very deep and very blue. I hold tight
to the railing on the fly deck of the dive boat as it rolls
sharply from side to side, and look down into water that’s
a thicker, denser color than I’ve ever seen.
For a moment I imagine that if I leaned over the side and
dipped my hand in the water, it would come out coated
in blue, like paint. Golden fragments of seaweed float by,
escapees, perhaps, from the Sargasso Sea’s swirling gyre
in the Atlantic Ocean. I would be content to stay on deck,
watching the sea’s colors go by, but there are deeper
things for me to see. I pull on my dive gear and jump
in. Beneath the waterline, as I kick downward, the colors
lose their intensity and slowly fade away.
Sitting on the sandy seabed at 100 feet is a shipwreck. It’s
a tanker that was seized in 1989 after U.S. customs found it
stuffed with marijuana, and was then deliberately scuttled
and sunk to create a new underwater habitat. I aim for the
deck that’s become fuzzy with a halo of seaweeds, corals and
other soft creatures, and hunker down behind the railing at
the back of the ship in a quiet spot away from the current.
Dark shadows lurk nearby in a hatch in the tanker’s super-
structure. Before I see the animals inside, I hear them, or
rather I feel them push pressure pulses into the water that res-
onate through my body. The bass notes are probably around
50 or 60 hertz, the lower notes on a pipe organ. Another boom
and I notice the wreck is vibrating. Then a fsh reveals itself,
a goliath grouper. It looks as if it were carved from a great
chunk of granite; it may well weigh as much as a grizzly bear.
Since the wreck was installed on the seabed, the goli-
aths have adopted it as a seasonal home where they congre-
gate in the summer months to mate. There are far fewer of
these fsh across the midwest Atlantic than there once were,
though. Not so long ago, their meat was canned for dog food
and their carcasses used to smuggle drugs into the U.S. For
decades, they’ve been a favorite of sports fshermen who love
to reel them in, hold them up for photos, then throw them
back into the sea, already dead. A 2009 study measured
the goliath grouper’s historic decline using archives of tro-
phy photographs taken by sport fshermen. In the 1950s, the
catch of goliaths often outweighed the human passengers on
board a sport fshing boat; their numbers had already been
decimated by the late ’70s.
Following prohibition on hunting them in U.S. waters in
the 1990s, goliaths seem to be doing a little better, at least in
eastern Florida. If you venture underwater at the right time
of year, there’s a good chance you’ll fnd a crowd of these
42 DISCOVERMAGAZINE.COM
giants and hear the deepest fsh voices in
all the oceans. It’s not clear exactly what
meaning lies behind these sonorous calls
— a warning, perhaps, or a male show-
ing off to females — but there’s little doubt
that these big fsh are indeed talking to
each other.
PITCHY FISHIES
It would be easy to assume fsh are silent
and unhearing creatures. They don’t have
ears, at least not ones that stick out of
their heads. And the sounds of the sea stay
trapped below: Most sound waves don’t
pierce the waterline, but instead bounce
back down into the depths.
Fish certainly do make and hear sounds,
but it’s taken a long time for people to real-
ize just how sonic an aquatic world can be,
partly because we ourselves are not well
adapted to hearing when our ears are full
of water. Normally, airborne sound waves
travel down a canal toward our inner ears,
making our eardrums vibrate. But when
that canal is fooded, it dampens the quiv-
ering membranes, muffing the sound.
The handful of noisy fsh that have been known since
antiquity are ones that protest loudly when they’re taken out
of water and dangled in fresh air. Aristotle wrote about fsh
that call like cuckoos, grunt or make piping sounds; there
were also, he said, some sharks that squeak.
Another diffculty in hearing fsh sounds underwater is
the fact that normally, in air, the slight delay between sound
waves reaching our left and right ears tells our brains where
the sound is coming from. Traveling so much faster in water,
sound waves hit both ears almost simultaneously, making it
hard to pinpoint the source.
In between my noisy breaths when I’m scuba diving, there’s
often a diffuse cloud of sound all around me. It takes some-
thing as loud and obvious as a booming goliath grouper to
give me a good idea of what’s going on. All in all, human ears
are not good at picking up and distinguishing the sounds of
fsh. To make sense of underwater noise, to fully appreciate
how talkative fsh can be, we need special recording devices
to do the listening for us.
LISTENING IN
In December 1963, a woman with short curly hair sat behind
the wheel of a gray Chevrolet sports wagon as she drove
north from Rhode Island, along America’s eastern shore
toward Maine. The car was packed with gadgets; there were
banks of waterproof microphones, spools of cables hundreds
of meters long, two-way radios and walkie-talkies, battery
packs and generators, a collapsible aquarium tank made of
canvas, and an aluminum boat strapped to the roof. This
was a fast-response mobile listening station, on a mission to
fnd noisy fsh. The driver’s name, it just so happened, was
Marie Poland Fish. She was usually known as Bobbie.
 As director of a research lab at the occasion, almost swallow the hydrophone
University of Rhode Island, Bobbie’s in its enormous mouth.
work was funded by the U.S. Navy. Back These fndings helped Navy person-
then, the military was keen to know what nel tune out the sounds of fsh and once
sounds fsh make. more tune in to the sounds of their ene-
Historically, mariners have reported mies. Bobbie had shown it’s not just a few
eerie sounds at sea. Moans, thumps and fsh species that are noisy, but hundreds
clanking of chains made many think their of them.
ships were haunted. This clamor became Indeed, fsh gnash their teeth to make
a major problem in World War II, when rasping sounds. Coral reef-dwellers
the hydrophones of underwater listen- called grunts get their name from the
ing stations could no longer detect the grunting sounds they make by grinding
distant whir of ship and submarine pro- their second set of teeth together at the
pellers. Submariners described all sorts Fish were so noisy back of their throats. Porcupine fsh rub
of unidentifable noises: mild beeping, their toothless jaw bones together, mak-
croaking and hammering, whistling and
they triggered ing a sound like a rusty hinge. Sculpins
mewing, coal rolling down a metal chute underwater bombs, use muscles to rattle their pectoral gir-
and the tapping of a stick being dragged dle. The list goes on and on.
along a picket fence. At times, the racket which were supposed
even drowned out the biggest battleships, CALLS OF THE OCEAN
disabling an important part of wartime to detonate only Since Bobbie’s work, biologists have, for
surveillance. the most part, continued to focus on the
Following initial investigations, it
at the sounds and sounds individual fsh make and hear.
became clear that some of the noise came vibrations of a Gradually, though, a new approach is
down to waves, wind and tides — but ani- emerging. More people are beginning to
mals were chiefy to blame. Fish were so nearby submarine. listen to the entire aquatic symphony.
noisy they triggered underwater bombs, The world is bathed in light from the
which were supposed to detonate only at the sounds and sun, and it’s also bathed in sound. Underwater, this sound-
vibrations of a nearby submarine. There was obvious stra- scape may at frst seem like a disorderly din, but there’s more
tegic advantage to be gained from knowing more about the to it than that. Off the coast of Western Australia, a series
hubbub of sea life, including when and where it was noisiest. of waterproof microphones have recorded distinct dawn
That’s where Bobbie Fish came in. and dusk choruses, lasting for hours at a time. These are the
When the war fnished, and for the next 20 years, she set sounds of thousands of fsh, calling to each other, fghting,
out to record and identify these unseen sound-makers, most firting, mating and eating at those most active times of day.
of them fsh. Using hydrophones developed as part of the war There is structure in this noisy world.
effort, she fxed long-term listening stations in rivers and bays In the cool, fsh-rich rocky reefs off New Zealand’s North
to gather ambient sounds of the underwater world. Between Island, another set of listening devices revealed that differ-
1959 and 1967, a research boat went out every week into ent habitats have their own particular sounds and a unique
Narragansett Bay, off the coast of Rhode Island, and brought acoustic signature. By listening, it’s possible to tell apart a
back fsh to Bobbie’s lab, where she recorded their voices. rocky reef covered in seaweed from one inhabited by sea
In 1970, she co-wrote Sounds of Western North Atlantic urchins; as they graze and scrape the rocks with their teeth,
Fishes, a book flled with spectrograms that showed the the urchins’ shells resonate like bells.
shape and texture of fsh sounds. Some of the spectrograms Much remains unknown about how fsh listen to these
came from the fsh Bobbie recorded in Maine’s Boothbay ambient sounds. It could be that they try to tune it out so
Harbor, like a pollock that was lowered into the canvas tank they can hear each other, like having a conversation at a loud
and made thumping sounds when it was handled; its spectro- party. But there are clues that the backdrop of noise mat-
gram shows repeated smears of sound, like a comb dragged ters to them, that fsh listen in and extract useful information
through paint. Another Boothbay fsh was the grubby, from the sonic miscellany.
whose spectrogram has two clean lines, one lower- and one Nocturnal sounds may be especially important. In shal-
higher-pitched, both lasting for four seconds, then repeating low tropical seas, many fsh are on the move between day
for two seconds more. The book also features the voice of and night. During the day, some hide and rest in patches
an ocean sunfsh that was found just outside Narragansett of coral reef or among mangrove tree roots. Then, as night
Bay and held in a sea pen. It made rasping grunts like a pig, falls, they swim to nearby seagrass meadows to feed. Most
which became louder and more frequent the more it was han- make their move when it’s dark in the hope they’ll go unseen
dled. A goliath grouper in Puerto Rico let off a tremendous by the most dangerous predators, the bigger fsh that hunt
boom whenever it was prodded, producing a spectrogram by sight. Similarly, newborn fsh spend their frst days and
that looks like a series of short strokes of a soft paintbrush; weeks in open water, again to avoid the reef’s many hungry
another in the Bahamas stayed quiet, although it did, on one mouths. In time, the young ones’ muscles and fns become

September 2018 DISCOVER 43

strong enough to push against tides and team found that, at night, fsh were acous-
currents. Only then do they turn around tically avoiding one another. In two
and begin a long swim back home. They dimensions, pitch and time, each voice
are guided at night by a built-in magnetic occupied its own space on the spectro-
compass and during the day by a celestial graph, like pieces of a sonic jigsaw —
compass, pinpointing the position of the different fsh called at different times or
tropical sun beaming down on the water. different pitches, building up distinct
As they get closer, the young fsh zero layers of sound.
in on their native habitat, following their There were deep, isolated booms, low and
noses and also their ears, listening for the long tones and clear, coarse pulses, pops,
sounds that could act as beacons guiding grunts and high-pitched whistles. The spe-
the traveling fsh through the dark. cies awake during the day produced more
To investigate this idea, Craig Radford jumbled sounds, perhaps because they
from the University of Auckland in New Recent studies are could see one another and combine their
Zealand led a research team that built calls with gestures; when they call, they can
small, identical piles of coral rubble, revealing that fish swim and fick their fns in eye-catching
spaced out across shallow waters around don’t simply yell ways, like shouting to a friend on the other
Lizard Island on Australia’s Great Barrier side of a busy room and waving at the same
Reef. Through underwater speakers sus- and shout however time to catch their attention. In the dark of
pended over each rubble pile, researchers night, when fsh can’t see each other, it mat-
played back soundtracks recorded in dif- and whenever they ters more if they have overlapping, clashing
ferent habitats. The morning after a noisy calls. Nocturnal species make sure their
night, Radford and his team counted the
want: They fit their voices don’t drown each other out.
fsh that had arrived on each rubble pile voices together These fsh are partitioning sound in
and found that some did indeed seem to the same way they divide up many other
be lured by the sounds of certain habitats. like an orchestra aspects of their ecosystem. Within a com-
Young damselfsh headed for rubble munity, species evolve to eat different
piles that sounded like a fringing reef of instruments in a foods and they split up the physical space
(dominated by the popping and crack-
ing of pistol shrimp as they snapped their
melodic musical score. they occupy. Now it’s becoming clear that
species also set out and establish their own
claws) and young bream were drawn to vocal territories.
the piles that sounded like an open lagoon. Far fewer fsh were
enticed by the sound of silence, played back to them in the UNDERWATER NOISE POLLUTION
control rubble piles. It’s early days, but it seems likely that fsh The ecology of sound is still a relatively new idea, and so far
can distinguish between the sounds of different places under- has mostly been applied to terrestrial ecosystems. There are
water, and follow their ears to the spot they most want to be. various birds, insects and frogs that similarly divide up their
These habitat soundscapes are subtly composed. Recent soundscapes and avoid masking each other’s calls. Studies
studies are revealing that, far from this being an impromptu on land also point to the problems that unfold for these
free-for-all, fsh don’t simply yell and shout however and vocal species when the world becomes noisier with human
whenever they want: They ft their voices together like an sounds. Traffc makes it diffcult for birds to hear each other
orchestra of instruments in a melodic musical score. and they can miss important messages, particularly during
One such study took place off the KwaZulu Natal coast of mating times.
South Africa, in the Indian Ocean, a short way south of the It’s too early to say whether fsh will suffer as we fll the
Mozambique border. Just off shore, steep canyons carve into oceans with our human sounds, from shipping traffc, seis-
the seabed. About 330 feet down, in a cave where coelacanths mic surveys, underwater sonar and thousands of off-shore oil
live, a team of European researchers led by Laëtitia Ruppé and gas platforms. Marine mammals are the focus of most
wedged a small recording device into a crevice in the wall. investigations into underwater noise pollution. Fish studies
After two months, the team fetched the device and listened are few and far between. But chances are, there are many fsh
to the sounds of the cave dwellers. out there whose lives are shaped by sound — fsh that are
South African biologists inside mini-submarines previ- doing their best to talk and make themselves heard in the
ously had visited caves in the area. They’d seen hundreds of clamor of an increasingly noisy world. D
fsh species living down there, including sound-making grou-
pers, soldierfsh and toadfsh. So it was perhaps no surprise
when the cave recordings played back thousands of noises,
many of them fsh voices. But what was surprising was the
From the book EYE OF THE SHOAL: A Fishwatcher’s
patterns those voices made. Guide to Life, the Ocean and Everything by Helen Scales.
Taking the most obvious voices and plotting them on USA. Copyright © 2018 by Bloomsbury Sigma.
spectrograms like the ones in Bobbie Fish’s book, Ruppé’s

September 2018 DISCOVER 45

 An archaeologist uses Burning Man — the world’s biggest pop-up community

46 DISCOVERMAGAZINE.COM
— to learn about humanity’s past settlements.
BY JONATHON KEATS
SCOTT LONDON AND JEREMY GUILLORY
 Every year around Labor Day weekend, about 75,000 people
converge on the Black Rock Desert in Nevada to build a city.
Occupying more than 14,000 acres, the pop-up metropolis
features distinctive neighborhoods, extensive dining and
entertainment, even a small airport. I find no hint of this when I
visit the playa, or desert basin, on a sunny afternoon in March.
All I see is a flat expanse of white alkaline soil, nearly identical
to what pioneers described in their 19th-century journals.
The disappearing act is by design. It’s one of the core attributes
of Black Rock City, guided by the tenets of the event for which
this temporary metropolis is built: the annual pyrotechnic
extravaganza known as Burning Man. Yet the weeklong festival’s
leave-no-trace ethos has not stopped archaeologist Carolyn
White from studying the city as she would any other vanished
civilization. In fact, the cyclicality is one of the qualities that
draws her here year after year.
After the festivities,
cleanup crews scour
the desert to leave it
pristine. Archaeologists
are interested in what
little is left behind.
 White, a professor at the University
of Nevada, Reno (UNR), has brought
me out to the Black Rock Desert
to see what she describes as “an
archaeologist’s worst nightmare.”
But it’s one that might help her feld
reconsider “the ways that archaeology
works,” she says. Her decade-long
project has entailed close observation
of the temporary settlement from
FROM LEFT: JOHN CURLEY; LACY ATKINS/ THE CHRONICLE/ASSOCIATED PRESS; MAP BY SCHWABENBLITZ/SHUTTERSTOCK
cultural anthropologist Deborah
Boehm — known as Fieldnotes on
the playa — call home when they Black Rock Desert
attend the festival. NEVADA
The Burning Man organizers
have enthusiastically embraced
White’s project, as I see for
myself when we run into
festival co-founder Michael
Mikel at a cocktail bar

construction to dismantling, as well back in Reno. Mikel,

as the analysis of any artifacts that get
left behind by accident.
Her work has yielded insights
about Burning Man as a cultural
phenomenon and the organizing
principles of urban habitats. It’s
even shedding light on possible
“unknown unknowns” in the ancient
archaeological record.
White has become a familiar
presence in Burning Man circles,
where she is known as Dr. Jones. (All
Burning Man regulars have “playa
names,” pseudonyms given by fellow
Burners. Hers references Indiana
Jones, the most famous archaeologist
who never lived.) White has even
created her own small settlement,
Camp Anthro, which she and UNR
also a historian and
a futurist, says White’s
work has helped inform
organizational efforts
to leave even less of a
trace on the playa than
Burning Man has in
the past — ironically
making her archaeology
more challenging. But
the connection is also
intellectual. “They encourage
scholarship about Burning
Man because they see Burning
Man as being historically
signifcant,” says White. “And
because there’s this irreverence
associated with Burning Man, they’re
willing to see more experimental
scholarship as something that’s
viable.”
Like the festival itself, White’s
contemporary archaeology is
radically exploratory. “When you’re
looking at an archaeology that
doesn’t go back into the past, it’s
almost looking into an archaeology
of the future,” Mikel says. “I think
what you’re beginning to do is to look
forward in time.”
GROWING AWARENESS
Although not exactly invented
at Burning Man, the practice of
contemporary archaeology is fairly
new, and still far from mainstream.
Arguably the earliest example,
and still one of the most famous,
originated in 1973 when a University
of Arizona archaeologist named
William Rathje decided to study
garbage in Tucson.
As a specialist in Maya civilization,
Rathje was well practiced in the study
of middens, heaps of ancient rubbish
It all started back in 1986, with an impromptu
gathering of around a dozen friends on a San
Francisco beach. Burning Man co-founders Larry
Harvey and Jerry James had transformed a pile of
scrap lumber into an 8-foot-tall wooden figure
that was doused in gasoline and set ablaze. As the
crowd of curious onlookers grew, they realized
they had the makings of a community. In 1990,
what became known as Burning Man moved to
its current home in Nevada’s Black Rock Desert
for the first time, where 350 participants
watched a 40-foot wooden figure reduced
to ash. As the attendance grew over the
years, so did the man, towering as high
as 105 feet.  ALISON MACKEY
The eponymous Burning Man falls to the
ground in flames at the 2004 festival.
that had provided his feld with most
of its knowledge about Mesoamerican
culture. Prompted by several students,
he realized that the same approach
could be used to understand his own
society. For the next four decades,
often with assistance from local trash
collectors, he amassed and cataloged
what people threw out. His research
revealed the degree to which people
were in denial about their junk food
consumption, and also highlighted
less obvious phenomena, such as
the fact that consumers waste more
perishables in times of economic stress

September 2018 DISCOVER 49

Burning Man’s eponymous man stands watch as tens of thousands of festival-goers gather in the Nevada desert in 2014.
because they tend to overstock.
Rathje’s Garbage Project had an
impact on public policy, informing
felds ranging from nutrition to
landfll management, but it failed
to attract broad support in Rathje’s
own discipline. “Archaeologists
ask, ‘Why bother looking at the
present?’ ” says White, citing a
prejudice against recency that even
extends to study of the 19th and
20th centuries. “There are still not
that many people looking at active
The late archaeologist William Rathje studied
modern-day garbage to glean insight into
human behavior. It was one of the first
examples of “contemporary archaeology.”
50 DISCOVERMAGAZINE.COM
sites,” she says, “and they often have
an activist or political slant.” As an
example, White cites archaeological
work on undocumented migration
from Mexico to the United States,
initiated by University of Michigan
anthropologist Jason de León, who
studies the distribution of abandoned
personal items in the Sonoran Desert.
The work shows how border policy
affects risk-taking behaviors.
White wasn’t aware of any research
in contemporary archaeology before
she became interested in Burning
Man. Her background was primarily
in American colonial material culture
when she started at UNR in 2005.
One of the frst sites she excavated
was a Depression-era mining
community called Rabbithole Springs,
just southeast of the Black Rock
Desert. She began work in the late
summer and found the area getting
dustier every morning. One day, she
mentioned it to a Bureau of Land
Management offcer who oversaw
the area. “Oh yeah, they’re starting
to set up,” he told her, referring to
the Department of Public Works,
a division of the Burning Man
organization responsible for laying
out Black Rock City.
“I’d heard about Burning Man
from my brother-in-law, but I had
no idea that I was physically that
close,” White recalls. “But I’d been
thinking about this idea of looking at
the world through an archaeological
lens. I started wondering whether
Burning Man might be a good place
to try it out.” Since the BLM is deeply
involved in the logistics of Burning
Man — which takes place on public
land leased by the organization — her
contact there had ready access. He
arranged a visit.
TOP: JIM URQUHART/REUTERS. BOTTOM: LOUIE PSIHOYOS
SEEING THE SIGHTS
White was astounded by the scale and
complexity of the emerging city, which
has grown every year since 1990,
when a group of friends moved their
annual summer solstice ceremony
from a San Francisco beach into the
Nevada desert. She resolved to return
one day during the festival itself, not
 How do you make a city of 75,000
disappear? With a little help from
your friends!
While every participant is expected to
adhere to the “leave no trace” core of
the Burning Man philosophy, things are
always left behind. That’s where the Playa
Restoration Team, or Resto, steps in, a part
of the Black Rock City Department of Public
Works. Starting on the final day of the
festival, this dedicated group of volunteers
spends weeks combing the playa for
damage and debris, helping complete the
yearly transformation from bustling city to
pristine desert.  A.M.

Above, volunteers form a line to make

sure every square inch is accounted
for. Mooping essentials (left) for the
Restoration Team include a pick-up
stick and container to hold findings.
Flags are plucked from the initial
grounds survey, and rakes and shovels
are also used to break up dunes and
clean fire marks.
An important part of the
Burner vernacular, MOOP stands for
Matter Out of Place. It can be used
as both a verb and noun, i.e. that piece
of trash is considered moop, while
mooping is the action of removing it.

A 9-mile fence goes up at the boundaries of Black Rock City to catch windblown trash.
The trash fence is the first structure to go up and the last to come down.
AARON MUSZALSKI (7)

From cell phones to bottle caps to the tiniest screw, Resto is determined to scrub the playa
clean of anything that isn’t part of the natural landscape.

September 2018 DISCOVER 51

A satellite overview of Burning Man’s Black Rock City in 2013 reveals the scope and structure of the independent festival.
only to witness the ritual burning of
the namesake wooden effgy, which
stands as tall as 105 feet, but also
to see the workings of a community
that operates on utopian principles,
including spontaneous gift-giving and
radical self-expression. All she needed
was a willing campmate.
A few years later, Boehm took a
position in the UNR anthropology
department. Like White, Boehm was
interested in contemporary society.
(Much of her feldwork has been
focused on the struggles of recent
immigrants.) Also like White, she
was a Burning Man neophyte. She
was naive enough to believe, as White
did, that a study of Burning Man
would be a nicely self-contained
project — an entertaining break from
her usual work. In late August of
2008, they set up Camp Anthro and
watched tens of thousands of Burners
descend on the playa. “I realized that
to study Burning Man is a bit of an
52 DISCOVERMAGAZINE.COM
overwhelming endeavor,” says Boehm.
White is more frank. “We were
kind of paralyzed,” she says. “I had
all these plans about how I was going
to systematically map camps with my
ruler and compass, but everything was
constantly changing. I threw my plans
out the window and started to walk
around like any tourist visiting a city
for the frst time.”
After her sightseeing, White realized
she needed to let go of the urge to map
camps by the centimeter, and embrace
the festival’s vaunted principle of
“radical participation.” She decorated
her bicycle and gave up the Indiana
Jones khaki for more colorful attire.
Inspired by Boehm’s casual approach
to learning about people through
conversation, she started hanging out
in camps and chatting with her fellow
Burners. Sometimes she asked them
to give her tours of their camps, where
she made quick sketches and took a few
digital photos.
Over time, White started to detect
disconnects between what she heard
and what she saw. “The gifting culture
is pervasive,” she says, “but as much
as there’s an openness, there are also a
lot of boundaries. In people’s camps,
the public space is always clearly
demarcated by things like a clear
path or extra chairs, but what is not
so visible is that there are all of these
private spaces that people close off.”
Her conclusion wasn’t that people
were trying to hide something or
being disingenuous in their embrace
of “radical inclusion.” (After all, they
were happy to indulge her invasive
documentation and to feld Boehm’s
nosy questions.) Rather, the research
showed White that even in this most
DIGITALGLOBE VIA GETTY IMAGES
free and short-lived of cities, “people
need their private space.” The radical
inclusion is made possible by these
secret escape hatches.
William L. Fox, who oversees the
Burning Man archive as director of the
 University of Nevada, Reno, professors Carolyn White (left) and Deborah Boehm, aka Dr. Jones and
Fieldnotes, visit the Center Camp tent during one of their many Burning Man field expeditions.
Nevada Museum of Art’s Center for
Art + The Environment, sees White’s
work as an important contribution to
how Black Rock City will be studied by
future generations. He also sees it more
broadly as “a model for investigative
behavior, a forensics protocol for
ephemeral events.” By learning how
to do archaeology in the moment,
White is adding a new layer to the
permanent record.
THE FUTURE IS PAST
In a windowless room on the UNR
campus, White shows me dozens
of Styrofoam trays containing tiny
artifacts. On one table are Depression-
era objects from Rabbithole Springs,
including bottle glass and pencil stubs.
The trays on the second table contain
cigarette butts, condom wrappers and
many, many pistachio shells. These are
the physical remains of Black Rock
City, a multiyear sampling of materials
collected by the BLM after the
Burners had gone home and a corps
of volunteers had walked the playa
LEFT: COURTESY OF CAROLYN WHITE. RIGHT: JONATHON KEATS
with trash bags.
The BLM collects these items as
part of an annual inspection, which
is one of the conditions of Burning
Man’s lease on the playa. Sixty sectors,
each a tenth of an acre, are selected
at random. Everything found in a
sector is put in a ziplock bag. The
law requires that the detritus from a
sector not fll more than 3.8 square
inches. Burning Man has successfully
surpassed this standard every year
since the frst BLM inspection in 1991.
In the past, the inspection materials
went in the trash. Now they get
shipped to White’s lab. Everything
from the 6 acres of inspection typically
fts inside a single medium-size Priority
Mail box. (The baggies take up most of
the space.) When a box arrives, White’s
students catalog the contents of each
bag as if they were artifacts from
Rabbithole or an ancient Maya city.
While these artifacts provide
insights about Burning Man itself,
they’re at least as important for what
they reveal about White’s profession.
“For me, it’s really useful to think
about what’s here as a way of trying to
understand what might be missing,”
she says. Because she attends Burning
Man in person, she can observe the
discrepancies.
One example she gives is the dearth
of safety pins. Having witnessed
the cleanup, she’s seen that some
volunteers turn safety pins into
jewelry, and other volunteers will
trade any safety pins they fnd for
other playa collectibles, such as shell
casings. “Whatever is considered
valuable might likewise be missing
from excavations on older sites,” White
says. The lesson of the safety pins
is that what is considered valuable
to a culture may not be obvious
to the archaeologist.
The little debris left behind after Burning Man
informs White’s approach toward archaeology,
and temporary settlements in particular.
Other blind spots revealed by
Burning Man have simple solutions.
For instance, White believes that not
enough attention is paid to the location
of latrines on historic and prehistoric
sites. “The port-a-potties at Burning
Man practically structure the whole
city,” she observes. By informing
future excavations, contemporary
archaeology can genuinely be — as
Mikel suggests — an archaeology
of the future.
In her historical work, White is
applying what she’s learned. Instead of
analyzing digs as fxed sites, defned by
surface features left behind when they
were abandoned, she wants to learn
how the areas changed through time so
she’s being more attentive to signifers
such as repairs.
“All sites are fundamentally
ephemeral,” White says. Even if they
don’t vanish annually like Black Rock
City, their state of fux is their source
of life. There is a trace of Burning
Man in every society. D
Jonathon Keats is a contributing editor of
Discover and most recently the author of
You Belong to the Universe: Buckminster
Fuller and the Future.
September 2018 DISCOVER 53
 h
C n E A c
Enc uNTeRs
o
How random numbers have influenced
spies, scientists and reality itself.
BY TIM FOLGER
ILLUSTRATIONS BY KELLIE JAEGER

Soviet one-
time pad

54 DISCOVERMAGAZINE.COM
LANDSCAPE: LESLIE BUCKLIN/LOS ALAMOS COUNTY GALLERY; BLAST: LOS ALAMOS NATIONAL LABORATORY; STALIN: NATIONAL ARCHIVES UK VIA WIKIMEDIA; SOVIET CODE BOOK: MI5 VIA RANUM.COM; TRINITY BOMB: LOS ALAMOS NATIONAL LABORATORY;

The Trinity
atom bomb

I
f it hadn’t been for a shortfall in the supply of random
numbers, one of history’s most infamous spy rings
might never have been exposed. The shortage occurred
in late 1941, two years after the start of World War
II. With Hitler’s invading armies poised to overrun
Moscow, Soviet leader (and erstwhile bank robber)
Joseph Stalin ordered key personnel to evacuate the
capital. In the chaos that followed, the NKVD — Stalin’s
intelligence agency and forerunner of the KGB — made a
mistake that would doom all the Soviet agents who would
infltrate the Manhattan Project, the top-secret American
effort to build an atomic bomb.
The error involved the NKVD’s codebooks, known as one-
time pads, which used random numbers to scramble letters,
VENONA DOCUMENT: NATIONAL SECURITY AGENCY; ROSENBERGS: LIBRARY OF CONGRESS; 109 EAST PALACE: LOS ALAMOS HISTORICAL SOCIETY

words and phrases. The random-number key to any particular

one-time pad was known only to the sender and recipient.
Without it, the encoded message couldn’t be deciphered. As
the name suggests, one-time pads were meant to be used once
The Rosenbergs
and then destroyed. Used properly, they were completely
unbreakable. But making them required the laborious print-
ing of volumes of random numbers. No one knows exactly
how the Soviets produced random numbers — computers were
still in their infancy. According to some accounts, the NKVD
employed a roomful of women who would blurt out numbers
haphazardly, or they may have used something like a lottery
machine, with numbered balls. This much is known: Their
schemes failed to meet demand.
“The Soviet Union couldn’t make random numbers fast
enough and distribute them to all the places that needed
them,” says Jane Nordholt, a retired physicist from Los
Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, where the
Manhattan Project was based. Faced with the need to encode

September 2018 DISCOVER 55

 tens of thousands of messages, NKVD world’s economy — could not function without random
offcials cut corners: They printed more numbers. They’re the foundation of online security, protecting
than 35,000 pages of duplicate random everything from the national electric grid to the sale of airline
number keys and distributed them to tickets. Like the one-time pads used by the Soviet spies, net-
agents in the feld. That fateful deci- worked computers send each other random digits to serve as
sion allowed American cryptographers keys to unlock mathematical codes. Except these codes aren’t
to crack the Soviet codes by fnding shielding the identities of spies — they’re encrypting online
repeated patterns in coded mes- passwords, credit card data and
sages that would otherwise have Te internet — and much much more.
remained impregnable. of the world’s economy — “Every time you buy some-
Two years later, in 1943, the thing on Amazon or input
U.S. Army’s Signal Intelligence
could not function without your credit card information,
Service — the precursor of the random numbers. Tey’re the your computer — somewhere
National Security Agency — foundation of online security, down in its guts — generates
started a secret program called protecting everything from a random number, which is
Venona to monitor Soviet dip- necessary to distinguish your
lomatic telegrams. The program
the national electric grid interaction and identity from
paid off in December 1946, to the sale of airline tickets. any other interaction and iden-
when Meredith Gardner, a tity,” says Raymond Newell, a
gifted young linguist and cryptographer, physicist at Los Alamos National Laboratory and a colleague
deciphered a message that mentioned of Hughes and Nordholt.
the names of American scientists Although there’s no danger of an imminent random-
involved in the Manhattan Project. His number-induced economic collapse, the technologies that
work eventually unmasked all the spies generate random numbers are straining to match the unceas-
who had revealed American bomb- ing growth in internet traffc. The computers for giant online
building plans to the Soviets, including retailers like Amazon might have thousands of transactions
husband and wife team Julius and Ethel occurring simultaneously, each requiring the exchange of a
Rosenberg, who were executed for trea- unique random-number key. Six years ago, a study found that
son in 1953. Venona’s crucial role in the a small but signifcant number of keys in use on the internet
Cold War remained hidden from the were not random at all. Almost 27,000 of them — about 4 for
public until 1995, when the project was every 1,000 public keys — offered no security from hackers.
fnally declassifed. The way random numbers are generated now, says Newell, “is
“They were decrypting stuff with unsustainable. It’s not as secure as people pretend it is.”
Venona until 1980,” says Nordholt, who There is, it turns out, a way to create random numbers that
tells me the Venona story on a warm are invulnerable to hackers — a task that’s actually harder
July afternoon in Santa Fe, New Mexico. than it sounds.
We’re sitting on a bench in the city’s old
colonial plaza with Nordholt’s husband, DEFINING RANDOM
Richard Hughes, also a retired physicist What exactly is a random number, anyway? And how do
from Los Alamos. Just one block east computers make them? I put those questions to Hughes and
stands the single-story 17th-century Nordholt as we sip chili-infused hot chocolates in a cafe
adobe building that housed the adminis- near Santa Fe’s plaza. At the counter, customers casually
trative offces for the Manhattan Project; pay with plastic cards, heedless of the random numbers
a shop selling Southwestern tchotchkes working on their behalf.
occupies the space now. During World Randomness is not always easy to recognize. Consider the
War II, the very existence of the town of following string of numbers: 1.4142135623730950488016887
Los Alamos was a secret, and research- 2420. It certainly looks random — there’s no discernible pat-
ers working on the project used a post tern to it. And it meets one of the criteria that Hughes tells
offce box number in Santa Fe for all me any string of random numbers must possess: Each number
their correspondence. in the string is independent of the one before it (unlike, say,
Nordholt walked me through the this string: 1248, in which each number is a multiple of its
Venona events because she’s thought predecessor). But that long string fails a crucial standard
about random numbers for quite a for the level of randomness needed in cryptography. Despite
while, and she and Hughes are starting appearances, the entire string is predictable: It’s the square
to get worried. Here’s a little-known root of 2. So it couldn’t be used as a secret key to encode data:
fact: The internet — and much of the Anyone with a mathematical background would recognize

56 DISCOVERMAGAZINE.COM

the number. For high-level security, complexity alone is not
enough. Says Hughes, “You need to have unpredictability and
irreproducibility.”
Most of us have a terrible grasp of the true nature of ran-
domness. One classic illustration of how our intuition fails in
the realm of the random is known as the gambler’s fallacy,
the belief that past outcomes affect future ones. If the frst 10
tosses of a coin come up heads, for example, it’s tempting to
think that the 11th will probably be tails. But the probability
of a tail landing face up remains fxed at 50 percent. People’s
unwitting embrace of the gambler’s fallacy has, predictably,
enriched many casinos. A particularly dramatic case occurred
on Aug. 18, 1913, at the Monte Carlo casino, in Monaco, when
a roulette wheel stopped on black 26 times in a row. Midway
through that fuky streak, players started betting heavily on
red, doubling and tripling their stakes, only to see their losses
mount on several more spins of the wheel. The casino made
millions of francs that day on the gamblers’ belief that ran-
domness could not be repetitious.
“There’s a Dilbert cartoon where Dilbert comes to the
basement of the company and meets the company’s random
number generator, and it’s a little monster,” says Hughes. “And
COURTESY OF JANE NORDHOLT AND RICHARD HUGHES
he’s just sitting there saying, ‘Nine, nine, nine. …’ Sometimes
a random number generator will do that. That doesn’t sound
random, but you can get quite long runs of repeating digits,
longer than intuition would suggest.”
Even computers have trouble with randomness. Unlike
us, they’re built to be predictable; they’re programmed. So
how can disorder be coaxed from a deterministic machine?
Computers today rely on so-called pseudorandom number
generators, software programs that tap natural background
Jane Nordholt
and Richard
Hughes,
both former
Los Alamos
physicists, are
worried the
internet might
run out of
random numbers.
jitters in a computer’s electronic
circuits and convert that static
into strings of numbers. They’re
called pseudorandom number
generators because they only mimic
the caprice of true randomness. The
digits they churn out may look as disor-
dered as coins spilled from a piggy bank,
but since they’re created by an algorithm
— a set of rules — they’re not really
unpredictable. “They’re complicated as
opposed to random,” says Newell.
With pseudorandom numbers, there’s
always the possibility that a skilled
adversary, armed with enough output
from the program, could fgure out
the rules it used to generate numbers.
In 2010, for example, hackers took
advantage of a poorly designed pseudo-
random number generator to crack the
security of Sony’s PlayStation 3, a faw
that would make it possible for anyone
with enough expertise to run pirated
games on the device. And in 2016, a
former security director for a lottery
vendor in Iowa was convicted of rig-
ging the game’s pseudorandom number
generator to produce results over a six-
year span that netted him $14.3 million.
(That criminal mastermind apparently
failed to anticipate the suspicions he
might arouse by winning millions in the
lottery he worked on.)
Such exploits reveal a fundamental
problem with existing random number
generators. “There’s a chain of trust
behind the scenes,” says Hughes, “and
part of that chain is, do you trust
the randomness that’s being used?
Underlying everything is trust.” Ideally,
trust would be removed from the enter-
prise altogether.
Nordholt herself has invented a
unique random-number generator, a
small box that fts onto a computer
September 2018 DISCOVER 57
 circuit board. It’s already being mar-
keted to web-hosting companies, banks
and data centers. The Entropy Engine,
as it’s called, harnesses a true source of
randomness — the chaotic jostling of
photons, particles of light — to produce
its numbers. If widely used, it would
greatly improve security on the internet.
Since the device is proprietary, though,
Nordholt can’t say too much about how
it works, so there remains some need
for a modicum of trust, even with her
device. When it comes to randomness,
there’s only one way to completely elimi-
nate the element of trust: a test devised
half a century ago by a man who proved
Albert Einstein wrong.
GET REAL, EINSTEIN
Affxed to the laboratory door in front of
me is a yellow and black warning sticker:
“Caution! Local Realism Violation in
Progress.” There’s nothing dangerous
behind the door, but the experiment
housed here does pose a threat of sorts
— to our understanding of how reality
is put together.
“This whole experiment is like a giant
coin fip,” says Krister Shalm, who has
been guiding me through a series of long
corridors at the National Institute of
Standards and Technology in Boulder,
Colorado. Since 2012, Shalm, an NIST
physicist and dedicated swing dancer
(he has used the Lindy Hop to illustrate
the principles of quantum theory), and
his colleagues here have been build-
ing an extraordinary sort of random
number generator. Their device is one
that would have confounded Einstein,
because it confrms the existence of
a phenomenon he derisively called
spukhafte Fernwirkung — spooky action
at a distance.
Einstein never fully accepted quantum
mechanics, the theory that describes the
properties of atoms, photons and all the
other particles of which the universe is
58 DISCOVERMAGAZINE.COM
made. He was tormented by the central role that chance plays
in the theory. The development of quantum mechanics early
in the 20th century completely upended the orderly, predict-
able cosmos bequeathed to us by Isaac Newton. According
to quantum mechanics, particles don’t possess any defnite
speeds, energies or positions until they are actually measured.
Before a measurement, their properties can be described
only in terms of probabilities; unlike the deterministic rules
of Newtonian physics, quantum theory deals with how fre-
quently things will occur.
It’s not just that we ourselves don’t know, say, a particle’s
position. Quantum theory suggests something far more radi-
cal: The particle actually doesn’t have a fxed position until
we try to look at it. Before that, it occupies many positions
at once. In quantum theory, reality is like a roulette wheel,
except the little white ball is “spread out” over every number
on the wheel and “collapses,” as physicists would say, on a
single number only when the wheel stops spinning and we
look. Einstein refused to believe that the universe was fun-
damentally random. “God does not play dice,” he famously
said. (Nor, he might have added, does God play roulette.)
Still more unsettling to him was the phenomenon of
entanglement, whereby one particle can instantaneously
infuence another, as though invisible wires connected
them, even if the two particles are on opposite sides of the
universe. The spooky action of entanglement defed one of
the central tenets of Einstein’s special theory of relativity,
that nothing can travel faster than the speed of light. This
convinced Einstein that quantum mechanics was lacking
something, and it pointed to the need for a more com-
prehensive theory. He argued that entanglement could be
explained by what have come to be called hidden variables
— as-yet-undiscovered rules that govern particle interac-
tions. Some future theory, he felt, would eventually describe
those hidden variables and vindicate him.
Most importantly for Einstein, his proposed hidden
variables only had local effects — they couldn’t violate the
limitations imposed by the speed of light. And if particles
did have hidden variables, it meant they must possess at least
some defnite properties even before they were measured.
Physicists now refer to Einstein’s viewpoint as local realism
— “local” because there is no faster-than-light spookiness
EINSTEIN: LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
involved, and “realism” because the particles’ properties are
permanent, whether observed or not.
SAVED BY THE BELL TEST
The arguments about entanglement and hidden variables
remained unresolved for decades. Then, in 1964, John Bell,
 a 36-year-old physicist from Northern Ireland working at the
European Center for Nuclear Research near Geneva, proposed
an experiment that would either confrm or refute Einstein’s
ideas. Bell’s experiment is subtle, Shalm tells me during my trip
to Boulder, but in essence, it is nothing more than an elaborate
quantum version of a coin toss, with photons as the coins, and
a phenomenon called polarization standing in for heads or
tails. That’s not to say the experiment was easy.
“It was absolutely brutal,” says Shalm, who started work-
ing on a version of the experiment in 2015. “It’s when I got
addicted to coffee.” On top of 16-hour days, he also got mar-
ried just as he and his colleagues at NIST started to get results
in the fall of 2015. “On the day of my wedding, I woke up in
the morning and was analyzing and running a bunch of calcu-
lations. It was a pretty stressful time.”
In an ordinary coin toss, there’s always a chance that the
coin might not be fair — maybe a cheater has doctored it so
that one side is heavier. The only way to test the coin for bias
is to toss it many times. In the long run, tails and heads should — and mushed them all together to
come up evenly if the coin is fair. Bell’s great insight was to produce a really good stream of random
show that repeated measurements of entangled particles could bits,” says Shalm. “One of our collabo-
reveal nature’s bias: If nature allowed spooky action, cer- rators has a sense of humor, so he put
tain experimental outcomes would occur more often than if ‘Bell’ into everything.”) This part of the
Einstein’s hidden-variable idea were true and things were truly experiment is equivalent to calling heads
random. “Quantum mechanics is a statistical theory,” says or tails in a coin toss. Crucially, the
Shalm. “It’s not like you fip a coin once and get the answer.” detectors are far enough apart — about CERN physicist
Bell’s test, as the experiment is known, has been performed 590 feet — that any communication John Bell
(above) came
many times over the decades. But only in the last few years between them about their measurement up with a way
have photon detectors and other optical equipment become choice would have to travel faster than to test whether
Einstein was
sensitive enough to conduct a defnitive test. Exemplars of that the speed of light. This rules out the pos- right about the
equipment rest on top of a long metal table in one of the three sibility of any conventional, non-spooky incompleteness
rooms occupied by the NIST experiment: a laser to generate explanation for the experimental results. of quantum
mechanics. NIST
photons, a special crystal to entangle them, flters and lenses Standing by one of the detectors, physicist Krister
to separate them and fber-optic cables that shunt entangled Shalm can’t hide his awe of the device, Shalm (top)
recently ran a
photon pairs away from each which was designed by his boss version of the
other to separate detectors. Te device is one that would at NIST, physicist Sae Woo experiment and
found Einstein
Photons, quantum theory Nam. “Getting the photons to
have confounded Einstein, was wrong.
tells us, are at once waves and these detectors is like quantum
particles. As the photon waves because it confrms the archery,” Shalm says. Both
zip through the cables strung existence of a phenomenon detectors sit inside a shiny cylin-
through the walls and ceilings he derisively called drical tank, cooled by liquid
here, they vibrate in different helium to less than 1 degree
modes, or polarizations. They
spukhafte Fernwirkung — above absolute zero. Fiber-optic
can do so horizontally, verti- spooky action at a distance. cables direct the photons into
cally or somewhere in between. the tank and toward a wire
And photons are unusual in that any single one can be split embedded on a chip a few billionths of
into two entangled daughter photons, and their polarizations an inch wide. “We’ve engineered these
will be different. If one is vertically polarized, say, the other things so that the heat from a single
must be horizontally polarized. photon is enough to heat up the wires.
In the NIST experiment, the two separated detectors are When that happens, we get a click. It’s
independently programmed to randomly choose how to really effcient. More than 90 percent
FROM TOP: J. BURRUS/NIST; CERN

measure an incoming photon: whether to look for a vertical of the time, when a photon hits one of
polarization, which requires one sort of optical polarizer, or these devices, it will be detected. It’s a
a horizontal polarization, which requires another. (What does remarkable achievement,” says Shalm.
this cutting-edge experiment use as a random number genera- If spooky action is real, then the
tor? “We took digits of pi, movies, TV shows — Saved by the Bell polarization measurements made by the

September 2018 DISCOVER 59

 detectors should be more highly corre-
lated than chance alone — or Einstein’s
hidden-variable theory — would allow.
That is, one detector’s measurement of
whether a split photon was horizontally
or vertically polarized would seem to
infuence the other’s results, and vice
versa. If the frst recorded a preponder-
ance of horizontal polarizations in its
measurements, for example, the other
would have registered more vertical
polarizations. By analogy with a coin fip,
this would mean that in several thousand
tosses, nearly every time one person got
heads, her friend in a separate room got
tails — an extremely unlikely result.
Yet that is essentially what the NIST
experiment showed, as did
two other recent Bell’s tests in
Europe. Nature is biased, and
the quantum coin comes up in
favor of entanglement. “You
measure tens of thousands of Te properties of particles
times, and with very high con-
fdence you can say this coin is
actually biased — we’re getting
correlations stronger than you
would expect,” says Shalm. True unknown even to nature.
randomness was confrmed,
and there’s no way any measurement of
the photons can be predicted in advance.
The odds that a hidden-variable theory
could produce the same results are
“one in a billion,” he says. “So you have
to give up this idea of local realism,
which was so comforting to a classical
physicist [like Einstein].”
A RANDOM REALITY
“These recent experiments have put the
fnal nail in the coffn of a theory that
was already dead,” says Scott Glancy,
one of Shalm’s collaborators on the Bell
experiment. “They have confrmed in a
fnal and defnitive way what the physics
community has known for decades —
that is, quantum mechanics is true, and
classical theories that obey this principle
of local realism are false.”
What does it mean to say that local
realism is false? The Bell test proves
that our conventional view of real-
ity needs revising. The properties of
particles like photons are not just
unknown to us before measurement,
they’re unknown even to nature: The
60 DISCOVERMAGAZINE.COM
quantum roulette ball really is smeared out over every possible
number. “Physicists stepped into this problem that sounds
like what philosophers have been debating for thousands of
years,” says Alan Migdall, a physicist at NIST’s Gaithersburg,
Maryland, campus. “What’s the nature of reality? Do things
have properties before you measure them?” The Bell tests show
that they don’t.
Besides the philosophical import, the results are impor-
tant for cryptography. “The fact that a quantity didn’t exist
before you made the measurement — that would be a terrifc
characteristic to have in a random number generator,” says
Migdall. “Because that means it was impossible for some-
body to have stolen it before a certain time, because it wasn’t
even there to steal!”
Over the next few years, Shalm and his colleagues plan to
harness the output from their experiment as an offcial NIST-
sanctioned random-number beacon. They hope eventually to
generate 512-digit-long random
Bell’s test proves that number strings every minute.
our conventional view Those numbers could be used
in a wide variety of applications
of reality needs revising. that require foolproof random
numbers, Shalm says, like
like photons are not just determining whose child goes
unknown to us before to what school or what voting
machines you choose to certify.
measurement — they’re “There are lots of applications
like that where this beacon
would be very useful.”
Ironically, there’s no formal mathematical proof that guar-
antees the randomness of any given string of numbers, says
Hughes, as we linger over our hot cocoa in Santa Fe. Even
mathematics has its limits. In the end, it seems the chain of
trust ends with our faith in one fnal link: quantum mechanics.
Soon, Nordholt and Hughes will be traveling to a security
conference in San Francisco, where they’ll talk about their
Entropy Engine. Although it hasn’t passed a Bell test, it draws
randomness from the same fathomless quantum well (though
in a different manner) as the NIST experiment. And it has the
advantage of not occupying three rooms.
Hughes, it turns out, was mentored by John Bell at CERN.
“When I was at Caltech, I had an offce across the corridor
from Richard Feynman. [Fellow Nobel laureate] Murray
Gell-Mann was next door to him. Bell was in that league.
Even though he was a theoretical physicist, he had this very
practical perspective on things. It kept him very grounded. He
didn’t get way off into the philosophical realm. I think that led
him to ask what turned out to be very deep questions. Is there
an experimental test I can do that would say if the world had
hidden variables, or if it works according to quantum mechan-
ics? He was the guy who proved Einstein wrong.”
God, for better or worse, really does play dice. D
Tim Folger is a contributing editor to Discover and series editor of
The Best American Science and Nature Writing, an annual anthology.
He lives in New Mexico.
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 Origin
Story
Hopeful Monsters
As evidence of hybrids in our family tree grows, researchers rethink
the species concept. BY BRIDGET ALEX
→ When it comes to species,
says biological anthropologist
Rebecca Ackermann, “forget
everything you learned in high school.” tree is tangled, and
The classic textbook defnition,
known as the biological species
concept, is a group of organisms that
only produce fertile offspring with one “Canids have, pigs have,
another. By this rule, domesticated
dogs are a single species — whether
dachshund or Great Dane — but a
donkey and a horse are not.
Ackermann, a professor at South
Africa’s University of Cape Town,
favors a different defnition that’s not every bush.”
dependent on successful sex: a group of
organisms sharing a mix of
anatomical, behavioral
and genetic traits
that distinguishes
them from other
groups. But, she
adds, “Many, many
evolutionary
62 DISCOVERMAGAZINE.COM
evolution, but it’s diffcult to
understand today, when ours is the
only Homo species left. To better
grasp our past, anthropologists like
Ackermann have begun researching
other animals that mate across classic
biological species lines.
There is one major problem with
biologists I know often avoid the word
species entirely.”
That’s because the evolutionary
the biological species concept: It
can’t be applied to organisms that
reproduce asexually, which includes
most microbes. The sex
many organisms on requirement also poses
diverging branches a challenge for extinct
can still interbreed. animals because
paleontologists can’t
mice have. You name tell just by looking at
it, and it has,” says two similar fossils if
University of Georgia the creatures could
evolutionary biologist mate. Excluding
Michael Arnold. extinct and asexual
“There’s a hybrid under organisms means the
biological species
That includes our concept does not work
ancestors. Genetic for the vast majority
evidence has shown of life that has existed.
that ancient Homo Nevertheless,
sapiens interbred Rebecca Ackermann of the biologists long
with Neanderthals University of Cape Town championed the
TOP: K. WARREN, COURTESY OF REBECCA ACKERMANN. BOTTOM FROM LEFT: ISSELEE/DREAMSTIME.COM; GEKASKR/DREAMSTIME.COM
and their eastern defnition, in part
cousins, Denisovans, several times because it ft the prevailing image of
from 100,000 to 40,000 years ago. evolution as a branching tree, in which
Neanderthals and Denisovans mated a single ancestral species diverges into
with each other, and Denisovans distinct lineages of descendant species.
hooked up with a distant lineage, “That was a classical idea,” says
not yet known from fossils, that may Arnold. Instead, he says, we need
have been closer to the earlier Homo to recognize that as descendants
erectus. branch off, “genes are still being
In recent ancient DNA studies, exchanged, even though we call them
almost “every time a new individual different species.”
is sequenced from the human fossil Interbreeding has now been detected
record,” says Ackermann, “there’s in 10 percent of animal species and 25
some new piece of evidence percent of primates, including ongoing
for gene fow.” crosses between such distant relatives
Interbreeding as gelada and baboon monkeys, whose
may have been a last common ancestor lived about
common theme 4 million years ago.
in human Recognizing the ubiquity of
interbreeding among primates, Arnold
authored a book a decade ago that
argued hybridization likely occurred
in human evolution. It received

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 Origin
Story

some scathing reviews individuals that looked

from anthropologists, like pure yellows. The
who thought Homo pervasive anubis genetic
sapiens took no part signatures suggest
in interspecies affairs the species have been
— until several months mating for hundreds,
later, when sequencing even thousands of
the Neanderthal genome generations.
revealed they did. Further analysis,
“I tried not to feel too including baboons from
smug because I’ve been farther afeld, however,
so wrong about so many showed hybrids exist only
things during my scientifc in a narrow, transitional
career,” Arnold recalls. zone between the core
territories of anubis
WHAT THE BABOONS and yellow baboons.
TAUGHT US It’s possible, Tung
Although DNA confrms thinks, that hybrid
that ancient hominins traits in this particular
interbred, it doesn’t tell habitat or social group
the whole story, including may not be benefcial
how hybrid offspring elsewhere. For example,
fared in different the darker anubis fur

environments or societies.
“We’ll never be
able to actually watch
interactions between archaic
hominins and our own lineage in
real time, but that’s something we
can do with nonhuman primates,”
says Jenny Tung, a biological
anthropologist at Duke University.
Tung studies baboons in Kenya’s
Amboseli basin. The population has
been observed for decades. Although
it’s mostly yellow baboons, in the
1980s researchers noticed occasional
anubis baboons, a separate species
found to the north.
Kenya’s Amboseli National Park is home
to yellow baboons (left) and anubis baboons
(right), as well as hybrids of the two species.
Hybrid baboon skulls (right) differ from those
of purebreds (left, two species shown) in size,
shape and traits such as number of teeth.
The lineages split roughly
1.4 million years ago — more than
twice the time thought to separate
Neanderthals and modern humans.
But despite physical and genetic
differences between the species,
hybrids documented among the
baboons are fertile and thriving.
“That started raising a lot of
questions about how can these two
parent species stay separate from one
another if they appear to be admixing
pretty freely,” Tung says.
To understand this process,
Tung and colleagues have been
conducting ancestry tests — “We
watch, you know, Abby the baboon
poop, and then we pick up her fecal
sample and extract DNA from it”
— and comparing those results with
behavioral observations.
In the team’s recent study, the 22
Amboseli baboons tested had 12 to
72 percent anubis ancestry, including
TOP: R.R. ACKERMANN ET AL./JOURNAL OF HUMAN EVOLUTION, 51 (2006). BOTTOM FROM LEFT: MARTIN HARVEY/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO; FABIO LOTTI/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO
that some hybrids
have may overheat
baboons in pure-yellow
territory, which tends to be hotter,
drier and more savannah-like
compared with mountainous
forests of pure-anubis land. If so, it
suggests that hybridization between
hominins may also have been useful
in some environments and societies,
but not others.
HOW TO SPOT A HYBRID
Ackermann also researches baboons,
but hers are dead. An expert in
skeletal anatomy, she got interested
in hybridization in the early 2000s
while studying bones from baboons
with known pedigrees. She’d notice
that some individuals looked a little
unusual, only to check their records
and fnd they were hybrids.
“Very quickly I decided I was going
to try to characterize quantitatively
what I was seeing,” Ackermann recalls.
She hoped to fnd skeletal features
that result from interbreeding in
general, which could be used to spot
hybrids among human fossils. It was

64 DISCOVERMAGAZINE.COM
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 Origin
Story
a provocative goal, years before
genetic methods would confrm
hominin hybridization even took
place. But her approach has an
advantage over even the most
cutting-edge genetic analysis:
While ancient DNA can reliably
identify hybrids, it’s rarely
preserved in bones from warm
regions older than 10,000 years.
Because she focuses on visible
skeletal traits, Ackermann can
potentially identify hybrid fossils
spanning the more than 6 million-
year history of hominins.
Measuring skulls from 169
yellow, anubis and hybrid baboons
that had lived in captivity, she
found that hybrids are not simply
intermediates of the parent species.
They do, however, frequently
have abnormalities such as extra
or misaligned teeth. It made
sense to Ackermann: Developing
hybrids would receive commands
from both parents’ genomes,
which might not be synced in
terms of when certain teeth
or bones should form. These little
glitches wouldn’t affect the individual’s
evolutionary ftness, but they could tip
researchers off to a hybrid.
Ackermann found the same
developmental quirks across diverse
mammal groups such as wildebeests
and gorillas. Then she applied her
method to human ancestors.
Anthropologists have long debated
whether particular hominin fossils
could represent hybrids, but usually
based their arguments on the
unfounded assumption that hybrids
resemble intermediates, or averages,
of their parents. In a 2010 study,
Ackermann used developmental
anomalies to suggest hybrid
candidates, such as 130,000-year-old
Neanderthals from Croatia with
abnormal premolars and 100,000-year-
old modern humans from Israel with
traits such as misaligned teeth and an
asymmetric face.
66 DISCOVERMAGAZINE.COM
Neanderthals (left) and anatomically modern
humans diverged from a common ancestor
but continued to interbreed on occasion.
Admixture allows
species to swap and
mix their genes, and the
novel traits resulting
in these “hopeful
monsters” could be
useful evolutionary
shortcuts.
She also included a 35,000-year-old
anatomically modern human skull
from Romania. Five years after
Ackermann’s study, ancient DNA
from another Homo sapiens at the
same site revealed that individual had
a Neanderthal ancestor just four to six
generations back.
EVOLUTION IN FAST FORWARD
Ackermann and her colleagues
want to know how common these
development quirks are among
hybrids, and whether they persist
in subsequent generations. Her
colleagues at the University of
Calgary bred several generations
of mice from three subspecies
and two species for the project.
University of Cape Town’s Kerryn
Warren, a recent doctoral student
on Ackermann’s team, analyzed
the bones.
The project is ongoing,
but Warren’s doctoral thesis,
titled “Of Mice and Hominins,”
offers a preview: Hybrid
communities are surprisingly
diverse. Offspring can resemble
one parent or a blend — or take
on forms unlike either parent.
Admixture allows species to swap
and mix their genes, and the novel
traits resulting in these “hopeful
monsters,” as Warren and other
researchers call hybrids, could
be useful evolutionary shortcuts,
especially for our ancestors.
As Homo sapiens expanded globally,
they confronted new environments,
foods and diseases. The migrants
could have evolved adaptations to
those pressures, but it would have
taken many generations.
Some groups, however, were
able to speed up that process: By
mating with Neanderthals and
Denisovans they encountered in
their new world, the lineages of the
newly arrived Homo sapiens could
have acquired locally adaptive
genes related to skin and hair color,
metabolism and immunity over mere
decades. “That jumps so far ahead
JAMES ESTRIN/NEW YORK TIMES/REDUX
of what you could achieve through
natural selection,” says Ackermann.
“Hybridization had a serious effect, a
big impact on people.” D
Bridget Alex is an anthropologist at Harvard
University and frequent contributor to Discover.
 Out
Tere

Tonight’s
Supernova
Astronomers are ready for the
next big stellar explosion —
whenever it comes.
BY YVETTE CENDES

→ In the year 1006, our ancestors

witnessed the biggest natural
light show in recorded history. A new
“guest star,” as Chinese astronomers
called it, appeared one night without
warning. It was brighter than a
crescent moon and visible in daytime.
As months passed, the star dimmed
until it was no longer visible over
a year later.
Today, we know the guest star of
1006 was a supernova. The most
violent explosions known, supernovas
can briefy outshine the rest of a
galaxy. The most common ones
happen when a massive star starts to
run out of fuel. Running on fumes, it Supernovas, the dramatic bursts of massive stars, are among the most violent explosions we’ve
can’t keep up enough internal pressure seen in the universe — and there’s always a chance one could go off in our galaxy soon.
to balance out the intense gravitational
forces of its tremendous mass. As a Te last supernova NEWSY NEUTRINOS
result, its core collapses into a neutron Our frst notice of a supernova would
star or a black hole, taking most of the observed in our galaxy likely not be its light, but rather a
star out with it. stream of particles called neutrinos.
Supernovas are rare; less than
was in 1604 — more Neutrinos are tiny elementary
1 percent of all stars are big enough than four centuries ago. particles, like electrons, but they hardly

TOP: ROEN KELLY/DISCOVER. BOTTOM: NASA/CXC/MIDDLEBURY COLLEGE/F. WINKLERCH

for such a fery death. (Our relatively
small sun will fade away gracefully
as a white dwarf.) In a galaxy the
size of our Milky Way, though,
astronomers estimate roughly one or
two supernovas should still light up
per century. Yet the last supernova
observed in our galaxy was in 1604
— more than four centuries ago. The
telescope wasn’t even around yet!
We’re long overdue, and there’s
always a chance a new guest star could
grace the heavens this very night. It
would be the astronomical event of the
century. So, what would happen then?
The “guest star” of 1006, actually a supernova,
is now a much dimmer supernova remnant.
interact with matter. Trillions stream
through your body every second with
no ill effect. A supernova produces
lots of neutrinos — as many in a few
seconds as there are atoms in the sun
— so a stellar blast would unleash a
tidal wave of the particles.
“If there’s a supernova in the
galaxy, then all the detectors around
the world should, at the same
time, record a burst of neutrinos,”
says Kate Scholberg, a physicist at
Duke University.
We know supernovas create
neutrinos because in 1987, one went

68 DISCOVERMAGAZINE.COM
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 Out
Tere

off in the Large Magellanic Cloud,
a neighboring galaxy just 170,000
light-years away. Dubbed Supernova
1987A, it was the frst source of
neutrinos identifed beyond our solar
system. Three detectors, thousands of
miles apart, recorded neutrinos from
the explosion at the exact same time.
What’s more, the neutrinos arrived a
few hours before the visible light did.
This is because neutrinos escape the
collapsing core immediately, but visible
light takes longer, caught up in the
outer atmosphere of the exploding star.
To take advantage of this early
warning system of sorts, Scholberg
coordinates efforts for the SuperNova
Early Warning System (SNEWS), a
network that will send out an alert if
two or more neutrino detectors report
a burst at the same time. Anyone
can sign up for SNEWS alerts, from
professional astronomers to the general
public, by visiting snews.bnl.gov and
Supernova 1987A’s released energy causes
a bright ring of debris about a light-year
across to glow.
click on “mailing lists.” Scholberg says
an alert would go out just seconds after
initial neutrino detections, and there
have been no false positives yet since
operations began in 2005.
SUPERNOVA GPS
After the alert goes out, the scramble
begins. While neutrinos will tell you that
light from a supernova is on its way, it
does not tell you its origin. There’s a lot
of space it could be coming from, and it
may even be hiding behind a large dust
cloud. It’s happened before: In 2008,
astronomers ran the clock backward
on an expanding supernova remnant,
and they concluded that the original
blast occurred between 1868 and 1908.
Dense dust clouds obscured the event
from us completely.
In fact, based on galactic dust, the
odds of the next supernova being as
bright as the historic “guest stars” are
just 10 percent. The odds are better —
as high as 30 percent — for a supernova
at least bright enough to see with the
naked eye from a dark-sky location
with little light pollution.
Such faint galactic supernovas
worry astronomers. Without any way
to narrow down the origin, “it would
currently take a long time to cover the
entire sky and fnd a faint supernova,”
explains Federica Bianco, an
astrophysicist at New York University.

The Birth of a Supernova

1 Massive stars rapidly
fuse hydrogen into
helium, giving them a
3 This triggers
heavier elements to
start fusing together,
4 Eventually, the
star runs out of
elements it can fuse
short life span. leaving behind a together, and its
Several m

multilayered core nuclear furnace shuts

2 At the end of its life,
once all the hydrogen
and an unstable star. down. The star’s core
begins to collapse.
illion

has been fused, the star

swells into a red giant.
yea
rs

Red giant
A few
milliseconds

Multilayered
core Core collapses Core expands

6 The supernova
is born. The star
5 The core collapses
explodes in a brilliant
A f e usan

until it physically can’t

TOP: NASA/GSFC. BOTTOM: ROEN KELLY/DISCOVER
tho

anymore, reaching the display of light and

w d

density of an atomic nucleus. neutrinos.

hu

n
ye dre
ar d It then rebounds outward
s
and collides with the still-
collapsing outer layers.

Several
milliseconds
Several hours

70 DISCOVERMAGAZINE.COM
 Out
Tere

to the technology at our disposal.

Work progresses on the assembly of the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope’s dome in May of this
year at Cerro Pachón, Chile. If all goes well, the observatory will capture the whole southern sky
every night, and finding even the faintest supernova.
The dimmest and farthest blasts might
never be found.
Hopefully this won’t be a problem
for much longer. Bianco is working on
the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope,
a powerful new telescope under
construction in Chile. By 2022, it
will photograph the entire Southern
Hemisphere sky each night, turning
up millions of clues daily on new
lights to check out, ranging from
asteroids to stars swallowed by black
holes. If a faint supernova goes off in
our galaxy at that point, the hard part
will be fnding it in the fre hose of
data each evening.
BE PREPARED
Should one go off nearby, we’d learn
a ton about supernovas, thanks
Observations could go beyond
visible light, allowing researchers to
analyze a supernova in other forms of
radiation, from radio to gamma rays.
And every supernova we’ve ever seen
(except for SN 1987A) was millions
of light-years away, so spotting one
so nearby — merely thousands of
light-years distant — would provide
unprecedented detail. Astronomers
still have many questions about the
blasts, such as how their earliest
stages unfold and how the collapsing
core’s shock wave interacts with its
surroundings. A nearby supernova
could fnally give us answers.
Until the alert goes out, it’s a
waiting game. We have no idea
whether the next galactic supernova
will happen tonight, or decades
from now. But whichever it turns
out to be, astronomers are prepared.
“The neutrinos are on their way,” says
Scholberg. “We’d better be ready to get
as much as we can out of it.” D
Yvette Cendes is an astronomer at
the Dunlap Institute for Astronomy &
Astrophysics at the University of Toronto,
and specializes in supernovas. Visit her
website at www.yvettecendes.com

Voted ‘Most Likely to Blow Up’

It’s impossible to predict a supernova, but that doesn’t mean

TOP: LSST PROJECT/NSF/AURA. BOTTOM: JON MORSE (UNIVERSITY OF COLORADO)/NASA/ESA

astronomers don’t have any guesses. Many suspect Eta Carinae,
a binary system that appears as one star of middling brightness
in the Southern Hemisphere’s sky, could be about to blow.
Eta Carinae lies 7,500 light-years from Earth, and the larger
of the pair is nearly 100 times more massive than the sun,
and 5 million times brighter. The system is already in the
unstable stages of the end of its life: In the mid-19th century,
astronomers recorded an outburst where Eta Carinae became
the second-brightest star in the sky. It lasted for two decades
before the star disappeared to the naked eye altogether.
Astronomers are still uncertain about what triggered the
“Great Eruption,” but they estimate this star shed about
12 times the mass of the sun then; it’s still visible around
the star today. A Hubble photo
shows off Eta
If Eta Carinae goes supernova, we’re in no danger. The
Carinae’s massive
only effect would be a temporary new “guest star” similar to dust clouds.
Venus.  Y.C.

72 DISCOVERMAGAZINE.COM
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 20 Things You Didn’t Know About …

Graphene BY GEMMA TARLACH

The typical pencil 1 It’s touted as a miracle material, promising that sunlight or a moderate laser beam caused the
lead (left) isn’t
lead at all, but everything from space travel to better hair, but graphene sponge to throw off a trail of excited
rather millions there isn’t much to graphene — literally. It’s a single electrons that pushed the material, which may prove
of layers
of an atom-
layer of carbon atoms arranged in a repeating ideal for light-powered sails that could one day
thick carbon honeycomb-shaped pattern. 2 Graphene has great propel spaceships. Talk about exciting. 12 But in
lattice called fexibility and strength, and because it’s essentially 2016, critics claimed that what appears to be light
graphene
(right). two-dimensional, electricity fows across it so quickly propulsion of graphene sponges may actually be an
that it’s one of the most conductive materials known. effect of the experiment’s highly controlled environ-

COUNTERCLOCKWISE FROM TOP: TALAJ/SHUTTERSTOCK; KOOSEN/SHUTTERSTOCK AND ROBERT BROOK/SCIENCE SOURCE; JIAXING HUANG/NORTHWESTERN UNIVERSITY; JAMES KING-HOLMES/SCIENCE SOURCE; JEFF FITLOW/RICE UNIVERSITY
3 You’d be forgiven for not knowing much about it, ment that’s not reproducible in the vacuum of deep
however. Graphene had long been theorized, but it space. 13 In fact, many of the proposed uses for
was only in 2004 that physicists Kostya Novoselov graphene haven’t panned out. For example, it’s too
and Andre Geim proved graphene could exist on conductive to be used in digital electronics, which
its own without being chemically bonded to other require a semiconductor. Other applications have led
elements. 4 Just six years later, Novoselov and Geim to hair-raising warnings. 14 In March, researchers
won the Nobel Prize in Physics for their work. Also announced in the journal Chem that hair could
in that short span, researchers around the world be colored by coating it in graphene rather than
published more than 5,000 papers on the material. using ammonia or other chemicals that penetrate
5 No doubt you’ve written a paper or two with and damage your lovely locks. 15 Don’t look for a
graphene. Many, many layers of the material, when cut ’n’ graphene color at your local salon anytime
stacked, form graphite, the key component of your soon, however. Critics point out that we don’t know
typical pencil lead. 6 How many layers? It depends enough about the material to be sure direct contact
on the thickness of the pencil lead, but it takes is safe either for us or our environment. 16 A 2016
3 million graphene layers to make a graphite review of studies on the toxicity of graphene and
crystal that’s just 1 millimeter thick. similar nanomaterials found mixed results. Some
7 Something else graphene can make? experiments showed that inhaling or ingesting the
Drinks. In January, researchers used materials caused considerable internal damage to
the carbon lattice to create a cheap mice and other animals. 17 Those initial cautions
and effective solar-powered water haven’t stopped researchers from experimenting with
purifer and desalinator that turned ways to get graphene into your home (and maybe
both seawater and sewage runoff into even your tummy). In February, a team announced it
potable water. 8 Sip on this: Graphene had used lasers to burn graphene into potatoes, toast
may one day allow us to sail through and coconuts. 18 The researchers believe the con-
space. This tantalizing tidbit requires a bit ductive material could be used for sensors that tell
of background. When graphene is layered, it loses you when food is no longer fresh and even whether
many of its properties, including fexibility and high harmful bacteria are present. 19 Whether or not it
conductivity. 9 A team of researchers tried to devise lives up to its hype, graphene has already inspired
a workaround by creating graphene “sponges” that researchers to create atom-thick lattices from other
were thicker than a single graphene layer but still elements, such as stanene from tin. 20 Stacked in
maintained its characteristics. But then something different combinations, these superthin sandwiches
odd happened. 10 When the researchers aimed a could be customized for the tiniest of circuits and
laser at the graphene sponge, it moved. In subsequent many other tech advances. But like graphene, any use
experiments, they found they could propel, rotate outside the lab is years away. And that’s the skinny. D
and even levitate the sponge using light. 11 In a 2015
Potential graphene Nature Photonics study, the researchers explained Gemma Tarlach is senior editor at Discover.
tech: hair color,
a tiny transistor
(held by graphene
co-discoverer Andre DISCOVER (ISSN 0274-7529, USPS# 555-190) is published monthly, except for combined issues in January/February and July/August. Vol. 39, no. 7. Published by Kalmbach Media Co., 21027 Crossroads Circle, P.O. Box
1612, Waukesha, WI 53187-1612. Periodical postage paid at Waukesha, WI, and at additional mailing offices. POSTMASTER: Send address changes to DISCOVER, P.O. Box 62320, Tampa, FL 33662-2320. Canada Publication
Geim) and a sensor Agreement # 40010760. Back issues available. All rights reserved. Nothing herein contained may be reproduced without written permission of Kalmbach Media Co., 21027 Crossroads Circle, P.O. Box 1612, Waukesha, WI
imprinted on food. 53187-1612. Printed in the U.S.A.

74 DISCOVERMAGAZINE.COM
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