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The Science Writer Every Science Nerd Wants You to Read

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Monday, November 21, 2022

On a gray Montana morning, I sat with the science writer David Quammen in the office of his Bozeman home, each of us in opposite corners and wearing masks. Quammen’s rescue python, Boots, who was staring at us from inside his enclosure, arched up and flicked his tongue in my direction. An air filter whirred in the background: Quammen had only just recovered from COVID a couple of days before, and by the next day, he would test positive again in a case of Paxlovid rebound.What a hacky, clickable headline this profile could end up having, I said: “David Quammen, Chronicler of COVID, Gave Me COVID.”Thankfully, our precautions worked. Quammen, 74, is the favorite science writer of many people who don’t usually read science writing. He also happens to be the favorite science writer of many science writers, a foundational figure. Among the kinds of people who cover anything from space telescopes to treatment-resistant bacteria, Quammen is a writer to geek out over. He’s perhaps best known for his globe-trotting adventures, which makes it more than a little ironic that, this time, his subject has tracked him down here rather than the other way around. I scanned the room, jotting down details such as a framed portrait of a white-bearded Charles Darwin and the desk peppered with Post-it Notes. “Smart,” he said, watching me work. “Offices are information-rich environments.”Quammen’s newest book, Breathless, which was recently shortlisted for the National Book Award, is the definitive account of how a little bundle of nucleic acid and protein called SARS-CoV-2 came to so upend our world, and the work of scientists to understand what it is, where it came from, and what to do. It was written almost exclusively in this room.In many ways this new work is a culmination of the kind of books that Quammen has been producing for decades. It’s also a clear break from them: a science story that refused to stay at a safe distance, that has almost all the wonder and joy leached out of it, and that we all lived through and many of us would just as soon forget.Let me come clean: I’m a fan. Quammen’s influence on the entire genre can be felt far and wide. Those viral New York Times stories about wacky animals with punning headlines? There’s some Quammen DNA in there, and in many other places.His first nonfiction book, The Song of the Dodo, which was published in 1996, is seminal: a set of swashbuckling pilgrimages to Madagascar, Mauritius, the Amazon, the Aru Islands, and more, braided with the intellectual history of evolution and extinction and rapacious colonialism; all of it suffused with discovery and tragedy; and pulled together, like the rest of Quammen’s work, by the snarky, conversational tone of a guy who majored in English in New Haven and somehow can name-drop Heraclitus or Absalom, Absalom! without sounding pretentious.The most pressing question I had for him about his new work had a setup like this: Song of the Dodo, like most great science or environmental writing, is propelled by both Oh wow and Oh no. In that case, the origin of awe-inspiring creatures on islands drives us to consider the incipient sixth mass extinction.  [Read: The revolution that rewrote life’s history]Or consider 2012’s Spillover, which introduced popular audiences to the dangers of new diseases crossing over from animal to human populations. There, Quammen braided together detective yarns about mystery illnesses with the Cassandra-esque warning from scientists that encroaching on ecosystems and cramming stressed creatures into markets could lead to the next pandemic. And now, of course, the new Breathless is a sort of Spillover sequel, wringing grim excitement out of the race to understand the SARS-CoV-2 virus, dedicated to its victims' surviving loved ones.To me, though, COVID would seem to threaten the entire format. Perhaps one of the greatest living science writer’s longtime hook—as I started to sketch out to the man himself in his office—was to find enchantment in the places that might feel unknown to most readers, in the jungles and bazaars. Then he would leverage this curiosity and color in order to illuminate evolutionary and ecological cycles with grave importance. Alexis Joy Hagestad / The Atlantic But this virus wasn’t one ounce enchanting. I feel oddly guilty admitting it, but for much of the pandemic, the only feelings driving me to stay informed have been duty, self-protection, and dread. Here was an evolutionary story with almost no wonder left and much less safe distance for the audience to have fun with the intellectual history of remarkable ideas. It came into our homes, even our bodies. Many of us were the story. How could you write about it without breaking the Oh wow, Oh no balance? Or, a variant on the same question: In a year when things are getting so visibly, evidently worse, how could one of biology’s great modern chroniclers write about the bleak outlook for biodiversity? Or about the climate crisis?We went back and forth on this point. Environmental degradation has been happening his whole life, he said. He hadn’t meant the takeaway from his work to be that all of this was out there, at a safe distance, an oddity to be discovered on safari; it had always been under the surface of all of our lives. Yes, he wanted even the ugliest story to read like a “guilty pleasure.” But this had always been about creating literary art out of hard facts for serious ends. If my sense was that the past few years had shattered the affluent science-book reader’s comfortable rationalization that Yeah, but this stuff probably won’t matter for me, Quammen’s answer was to say no: The idea that we were at a safe remove had already been a fantasy.[Read: The pre-pandemic universe was the fiction]He said as much after we left his house and drove out that drizzly morning to do some hiking, both of us wearing masks in his RAV4 with the windows cracked. “You realize that ecology and conservation and evolutionary biology are not small subcategories of the field of biology, which is a small subcategory of human science, which is a small category of human endeavor,” he said. “It’s the other way around.”The haunting first sections of Breathless drift among various disease researchers who had worried that something like this would happen, or who knew enough to start worrying when a mystery pneumonia cluster popped up in Wuhan in the final days of 2019. First, we meet someone smart. Then we watch as they take a tilt at the emerging virus, chipping off some hard-won fact or insight. Understanding builds up piece by piece as we watch over these experts’ shoulders.In theory, it’s hard to imagine anyone better positioned to write this story. In the course of exploring how viruses leap from animals to people, Spillover had devoted an entire section to the original SARS outbreak of the early 2000s, a more fatal, less transmissible coronavirus that got snuffed out by good public policy before escaping into endemicity. Revisiting that reporting is eerie, and good luck getting a visa approved to do it now. He wrangled bats in a cave in southern China with coronavirus-hunting researchers, then visited a farm full of bamboo rats, the kind of market animal that could act as an evolutionary or geographic intermediary between a bat virus and humanity.Toward the end of January 2020, Quammen weighed in on a then-emerging virus for The New York Times with his own uncertainty about how big a story this would be. “Six months from today, Wuhan pneumonia may be receding into memory. Or not.” He left home for a month in Tasmania researching Tasmanian devils beset by contagious face cancers, but spent much of that time answering media requests for commentary on the worsening situation. By mid-2020 he had dropped the devils and committed to a COVID book, he told me. But writing it demanded abandoning his typical approach.[Read: The dragon autopsy]For one, he needed to do his reporting over Zoom. His operating principle since The Song of the Dodo had been to hop on a plane. “If you’re writing about Komodo dragons, go to Komodo,” he said. The pandemic precluded travel, though, and he couldn’t see himself getting to the scrubbed, shut down Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market anytime soon. But perhaps he didn’t need to. Readers could be assumed to know much of the background and the dramatis personae already; no need to spend much time introducing Tony Fauci.Then there was the science itself, which refused to stay still. New variants kept evolving into existence as he wrote. (The book ends with the rise of the original Omicron strain, for example.) Scientists, journalists, and politicians battled over whether COVID came from “a natural” origin or a lab leak, a debate that consumes Breathless’ s penultimate section. And considering that the virus had touched so many people and places—and with his reader’s confidence in institutional authority likely shaken—Quammen has difficulty finding a single trustworthy point of view to put at the center of the narrative.Eyeing these constraints, Quammen settled on a reporting structure he hadn’t tried before: what he called a “Greek chorus” of Zoom interviews with 95 experts across the world, who are dutifully listed and credited in the back of the book. “More than fifty years ago, when I first read Faulkner and fell under his spell, the single impression that struck me most,” he writes on the book’s final page, “was that the truth of any event or person is fragmented.”The result is a gripping, first-draft-of-history account of a virus’s first two years on Earth, pieced together from various lines of scientific evidence and then enlivened by metaphor. Quammen seems to know exactly how far into the weeds he can go—pretty far—before offering a change of pace. A few images hit me especially hard, none more so than an excursion into the conservation woes of pangolins, another possible intermediary mammal for coronavirus spillover. Quammen quotes a paper that described an illness in pangolins as rendering the animals “mostly inactive and sobbing,” before dying in custody “despite exhausting rescue efforts.” His response:  “Sobbing might be taken as a metaphor for respiratory struggle, but then again, sometimes a sob is just a sob.”Breathless, like the virus it depicts, is a dramatic culmination of an idea that Quammen introduced many of us to in Spillover: that the science story of viral ecology could very easily become the biggest story on planet Earth. Once that happened, though, it wasn’t just a science story, a complexity that Quammen acknowledges while still mostly sticking to technical matters. Politics and public health and a zillion other dimensions came into play, as did a new, forced intimacy that almost all of us bring to the subject matter. A subtle refrain echoes throughout the book, typically after a flourish of scientific detective work. “Meanwhile,” Quammen will write, “people were dying.”On the way to Montana with my advance copy of Breathless, another gimmick had occurred to me. Here I was flying out to Quammen in much the same way Quammen might approach a Komodo dragon: as a larger-than-life character who might shed insight on an underlying reality. In this case, the matter of What It Means to Write and Read Science Today.Of course, this necessitated seeing him in his natural habitat, not just in the office. After our chat in his office, we drove south of town to the Gallatin River and pulled into a turnout by the side of the highway. Then we stood on the riverbank, trucks roaring behind us. This was an important place from his old white-water-kayaking days, he told me. When I asked him to annotate what he saw, he responded with three sequential stories about a boulder in the water named House Rock.The first was embodied, kinetic, personal. As you move through a calm stretch of water toward this rock and the surrounding white water in a kayak, tension builds, like a roller coaster inching past the apex of the track. But long ago, a veteran kayaker had helped him thread a safe route through. This sealed what would be a 20-year passion for white-water kayaking, even though he’s since aged out of it, and it may explain why he had brought the city-slicker youngster writing his profile out here.The second story was grim but memorable. One time, as he reached this spot, he saw a search team in orange vests pulling out the skeleton of a college student who had been killed about a year earlier in a drunken misadventure. Then, a little while later, a friend of Quammen’s spilled out of his boat right nearby. The friend caught himself in the rocks, and seemed to be rooting around before he joined the rest of their regular kayaking gang with a “gruesome smile.” In his hand, the friend held the college student’s missing jawbone, which they took back to town and gave to the coroner.“And all that was probably more than you asked for,” he said, but of course we were also in Montana in fall with the forests already reddening, and in his head he held a browsable library of optional ecological context. “I also see, you know, these cottonwoods, and there’s an ouzel, a bird, working underwater here,” he said, pointing.Quammen was using his old formula. Here the world had worn a little thin and we could see hidden things showing through. Here, adventure, raw narrative, and ambient nature were all frothing around a real place governed, like the rest of physical reality, by both contingent circumstance and the laws of science. Writer to writer, I found this and the rest of my time with Quammen inspirational, thrilling. I also thought, later on: I don’t know if there will be another David Quammen.  Science writing as a larger guild is in a tricky spot. It’s needed, yes. Future viral outbreaks are assured, ecosystems are collapsing, and the climate crisis rages on. But conspiracy-minded politics, the ceaseless chaos of social media, and a rising skepticism toward expertise make it harder than ever for anyone to establish themselves as a trustworthy source of information.[Read: Forest animals are living on the edge]“I’m just an English major who has written a bunch of books and magazine articles,” Quammen told me. Any authority he had was only on loan, borrowed from the chorus of actual experts he had spoken with, their data, and their interpretations. “I’ve tried to give people what I think we need, which is thoroughness, respect for scientific expertise, respect for the provisionality of science, a little bit of skeptical humor,” he said. “And respect for a diversity of opinions.”Another threat to the genre, more prosaic but no less consequential, is that the economics of it aren’t quite working out.In quick succession after I left Quammen’s company, a gifted, entrepreneurial freelancer, Marion Renault—maybe the younger science writer I most admire—posted a series of tweets about how financial insecurity and the overall precarity of their work had forced them to step back from the business. Then Gimlet Media laid off the staff of a climate podcast. A few weeks earlier, six editors had been laid off at National Geographic, the outlet that about two decades ago had offered Quammen three round-trip business-class tickets to Africa for the story that spawned the idea that led to Spillover and subsequently Breathless. (He opted to fly coach instead and do more reporting, he said. Learning about that era in journalism felt like learning that in the Carboniferous Period, there had been so much oxygen in the air that dragonflies could have two-foot wingspans, I said.)After the rock, we moved to a nearby parking lot, then started hiking uphill, Quammen testing out a pair of surgically replaced knees. On the way back down he pointed out to me a tiny spruce tree growing, improbably, atop a boulder. It reminded him of a landscape in Yellowstone National Park, a place where he has reported extensively, and where he would have taken me if recent, extreme rains hadn’t washed away parts of the most convenient road.He described it instead. A wide open valley of grass and scattered boulders called “glacial erratics.” Each boulder has one tree nestled up right next to it, as if the rock had slid into a tree and stopped. “What does that represent?” he asked. “It represents the fact that this is such a severe environment that a Douglas fir cannot get started through the sapling phase without a rock to hide behind.”Not to overburden those trees in that valley, but later the idea of the tree nurseries seemed to represent a lot of things, among them both the fragments of wonder still left in the natural world and the persistence of a scattered few good science writers to examine what’s happening out there. The tall, established trees were hanging on; for any new ones to have any chance, though, they needed luck, privilege, shelter. We kept walking. I asked him what he thought the fate of that ecosystem might be.“It may be that you come through there 40 years from now, and you see all these big glacial erratics and standing next to each one of them is a dead snag of a previously living Douglas fir,” he said. We continued down, and I continued to prod him about science writing in a world ruled by more and more unhinged ecological, evolutionary, and environmental cycles, and he gently pushed back.“Things are still funny, and joyous, and wonderful,” he said, turning out to the healthy forest around us. “This day—this day is not sad.”

A visit with David Quammen, who confronted in COVID a story that refused to stay at a safe distance

On a gray Montana morning, I sat with the science writer David Quammen in the office of his Bozeman home, each of us in opposite corners and wearing masks. Quammen’s rescue python, Boots, who was staring at us from inside his enclosure, arched up and flicked his tongue in my direction. An air filter whirred in the background: Quammen had only just recovered from COVID a couple of days before, and by the next day, he would test positive again in a case of Paxlovid rebound.

What a hacky, clickable headline this profile could end up having, I said: “David Quammen, Chronicler of COVID, Gave Me COVID.”

Thankfully, our precautions worked. Quammen, 74, is the favorite science writer of many people who don’t usually read science writing. He also happens to be the favorite science writer of many science writers, a foundational figure. Among the kinds of people who cover anything from space telescopes to treatment-resistant bacteria, Quammen is a writer to geek out over. He’s perhaps best known for his globe-trotting adventures, which makes it more than a little ironic that, this time, his subject has tracked him down here rather than the other way around. I scanned the room, jotting down details such as a framed portrait of a white-bearded Charles Darwin and the desk peppered with Post-it Notes. “Smart,” he said, watching me work. “Offices are information-rich environments.”

Quammen’s newest book, Breathless, which was recently shortlisted for the National Book Award, is the definitive account of how a little bundle of nucleic acid and protein called SARS-CoV-2 came to so upend our world, and the work of scientists to understand what it is, where it came from, and what to do. It was written almost exclusively in this room.

In many ways this new work is a culmination of the kind of books that Quammen has been producing for decades. It’s also a clear break from them: a science story that refused to stay at a safe distance, that has almost all the wonder and joy leached out of it, and that we all lived through and many of us would just as soon forget.

Let me come clean: I’m a fan. Quammen’s influence on the entire genre can be felt far and wide. Those viral New York Times stories about wacky animals with punning headlines? There’s some Quammen DNA in there, and in many other places.

His first nonfiction book, The Song of the Dodo, which was published in 1996, is seminal: a set of swashbuckling pilgrimages to Madagascar, Mauritius, the Amazon, the Aru Islands, and more, braided with the intellectual history of evolution and extinction and rapacious colonialism; all of it suffused with discovery and tragedy; and pulled together, like the rest of Quammen’s work, by the snarky, conversational tone of a guy who majored in English in New Haven and somehow can name-drop Heraclitus or Absalom, Absalom! without sounding pretentious.

The most pressing question I had for him about his new work had a setup like this: Song of the Dodo, like most great science or environmental writing, is propelled by both Oh wow and Oh no. In that case, the origin of awe-inspiring creatures on islands drives us to consider the incipient sixth mass extinction.  

[Read: The revolution that rewrote life’s history]

Or consider 2012’s Spillover, which introduced popular audiences to the dangers of new diseases crossing over from animal to human populations. There, Quammen braided together detective yarns about mystery illnesses with the Cassandra-esque warning from scientists that encroaching on ecosystems and cramming stressed creatures into markets could lead to the next pandemic. And now, of course, the new Breathless is a sort of Spillover sequel, wringing grim excitement out of the race to understand the SARS-CoV-2 virus, dedicated to its victims' surviving loved ones.

To me, though, COVID would seem to threaten the entire format. Perhaps one of the greatest living science writer’s longtime hook—as I started to sketch out to the man himself in his office—was to find enchantment in the places that might feel unknown to most readers, in the jungles and bazaars. Then he would leverage this curiosity and color in order to illuminate evolutionary and ecological cycles with grave importance.

David Quammen
Alexis Joy Hagestad / The Atlantic

But this virus wasn’t one ounce enchanting. I feel oddly guilty admitting it, but for much of the pandemic, the only feelings driving me to stay informed have been duty, self-protection, and dread. Here was an evolutionary story with almost no wonder left and much less safe distance for the audience to have fun with the intellectual history of remarkable ideas. It came into our homes, even our bodies. Many of us were the story. How could you write about it without breaking the Oh wow, Oh no balance? Or, a variant on the same question: In a year when things are getting so visibly, evidently worse, how could one of biology’s great modern chroniclers write about the bleak outlook for biodiversity? Or about the climate crisis?

We went back and forth on this point. Environmental degradation has been happening his whole life, he said. He hadn’t meant the takeaway from his work to be that all of this was out there, at a safe distance, an oddity to be discovered on safari; it had always been under the surface of all of our lives. Yes, he wanted even the ugliest story to read like a “guilty pleasure.” But this had always been about creating literary art out of hard facts for serious ends. If my sense was that the past few years had shattered the affluent science-book reader’s comfortable rationalization that Yeah, but this stuff probably won’t matter for me, Quammen’s answer was to say no: The idea that we were at a safe remove had already been a fantasy.

[Read: The pre-pandemic universe was the fiction]

He said as much after we left his house and drove out that drizzly morning to do some hiking, both of us wearing masks in his RAV4 with the windows cracked. “You realize that ecology and conservation and evolutionary biology are not small subcategories of the field of biology, which is a small subcategory of human science, which is a small category of human endeavor,” he said. “It’s the other way around.”

The haunting first sections of Breathless drift among various disease researchers who had worried that something like this would happen, or who knew enough to start worrying when a mystery pneumonia cluster popped up in Wuhan in the final days of 2019. First, we meet someone smart. Then we watch as they take a tilt at the emerging virus, chipping off some hard-won fact or insight. Understanding builds up piece by piece as we watch over these experts’ shoulders.

In theory, it’s hard to imagine anyone better positioned to write this story. In the course of exploring how viruses leap from animals to people, Spillover had devoted an entire section to the original SARS outbreak of the early 2000s, a more fatal, less transmissible coronavirus that got snuffed out by good public policy before escaping into endemicity. Revisiting that reporting is eerie, and good luck getting a visa approved to do it now. He wrangled bats in a cave in southern China with coronavirus-hunting researchers, then visited a farm full of bamboo rats, the kind of market animal that could act as an evolutionary or geographic intermediary between a bat virus and humanity.

Toward the end of January 2020, Quammen weighed in on a then-emerging virus for The New York Times with his own uncertainty about how big a story this would be. “Six months from today, Wuhan pneumonia may be receding into memory. Or not.” He left home for a month in Tasmania researching Tasmanian devils beset by contagious face cancers, but spent much of that time answering media requests for commentary on the worsening situation. By mid-2020 he had dropped the devils and committed to a COVID book, he told me. But writing it demanded abandoning his typical approach.

[Read: The dragon autopsy]

For one, he needed to do his reporting over Zoom. His operating principle since The Song of the Dodo had been to hop on a plane. “If you’re writing about Komodo dragons, go to Komodo,” he said. The pandemic precluded travel, though, and he couldn’t see himself getting to the scrubbed, shut down Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market anytime soon. But perhaps he didn’t need to. Readers could be assumed to know much of the background and the dramatis personae already; no need to spend much time introducing Tony Fauci.

Then there was the science itself, which refused to stay still. New variants kept evolving into existence as he wrote. (The book ends with the rise of the original Omicron strain, for example.) Scientists, journalists, and politicians battled over whether COVID came from “a natural” origin or a lab leak, a debate that consumes Breathless’ s penultimate section. And considering that the virus had touched so many people and places—and with his reader’s confidence in institutional authority likely shaken—Quammen has difficulty finding a single trustworthy point of view to put at the center of the narrative.

Eyeing these constraints, Quammen settled on a reporting structure he hadn’t tried before: what he called a “Greek chorus” of Zoom interviews with 95 experts across the world, who are dutifully listed and credited in the back of the book. “More than fifty years ago, when I first read Faulkner and fell under his spell, the single impression that struck me most,” he writes on the book’s final page, “was that the truth of any event or person is fragmented.”

The result is a gripping, first-draft-of-history account of a virus’s first two years on Earth, pieced together from various lines of scientific evidence and then enlivened by metaphor. Quammen seems to know exactly how far into the weeds he can go—pretty far—before offering a change of pace. A few images hit me especially hard, none more so than an excursion into the conservation woes of pangolins, another possible intermediary mammal for coronavirus spillover. Quammen quotes a paper that described an illness in pangolins as rendering the animals “mostly inactive and sobbing,” before dying in custody “despite exhausting rescue efforts.” His response:  “Sobbing might be taken as a metaphor for respiratory struggle, but then again, sometimes a sob is just a sob.”

Breathless, like the virus it depicts, is a dramatic culmination of an idea that Quammen introduced many of us to in Spillover: that the science story of viral ecology could very easily become the biggest story on planet Earth. Once that happened, though, it wasn’t just a science story, a complexity that Quammen acknowledges while still mostly sticking to technical matters. Politics and public health and a zillion other dimensions came into play, as did a new, forced intimacy that almost all of us bring to the subject matter. A subtle refrain echoes throughout the book, typically after a flourish of scientific detective work. “Meanwhile,” Quammen will write, “people were dying.”

On the way to Montana with my advance copy of Breathless, another gimmick had occurred to me. Here I was flying out to Quammen in much the same way Quammen might approach a Komodo dragon: as a larger-than-life character who might shed insight on an underlying reality. In this case, the matter of What It Means to Write and Read Science Today.

Of course, this necessitated seeing him in his natural habitat, not just in the office. After our chat in his office, we drove south of town to the Gallatin River and pulled into a turnout by the side of the highway. Then we stood on the riverbank, trucks roaring behind us. This was an important place from his old white-water-kayaking days, he told me. When I asked him to annotate what he saw, he responded with three sequential stories about a boulder in the water named House Rock.

The first was embodied, kinetic, personal. As you move through a calm stretch of water toward this rock and the surrounding white water in a kayak, tension builds, like a roller coaster inching past the apex of the track. But long ago, a veteran kayaker had helped him thread a safe route through. This sealed what would be a 20-year passion for white-water kayaking, even though he’s since aged out of it, and it may explain why he had brought the city-slicker youngster writing his profile out here.

The second story was grim but memorable. One time, as he reached this spot, he saw a search team in orange vests pulling out the skeleton of a college student who had been killed about a year earlier in a drunken misadventure. Then, a little while later, a friend of Quammen’s spilled out of his boat right nearby. The friend caught himself in the rocks, and seemed to be rooting around before he joined the rest of their regular kayaking gang with a “gruesome smile.” In his hand, the friend held the college student’s missing jawbone, which they took back to town and gave to the coroner.

“And all that was probably more than you asked for,” he said, but of course we were also in Montana in fall with the forests already reddening, and in his head he held a browsable library of optional ecological context. “I also see, you know, these cottonwoods, and there’s an ouzel, a bird, working underwater here,” he said, pointing.

Quammen was using his old formula. Here the world had worn a little thin and we could see hidden things showing through. Here, adventure, raw narrative, and ambient nature were all frothing around a real place governed, like the rest of physical reality, by both contingent circumstance and the laws of science. Writer to writer, I found this and the rest of my time with Quammen inspirational, thrilling. I also thought, later on: I don’t know if there will be another David Quammen.  

Science writing as a larger guild is in a tricky spot. It’s needed, yes. Future viral outbreaks are assured, ecosystems are collapsing, and the climate crisis rages on. But conspiracy-minded politics, the ceaseless chaos of social media, and a rising skepticism toward expertise make it harder than ever for anyone to establish themselves as a trustworthy source of information.

[Read: Forest animals are living on the edge]

“I’m just an English major who has written a bunch of books and magazine articles,” Quammen told me. Any authority he had was only on loan, borrowed from the chorus of actual experts he had spoken with, their data, and their interpretations. “I’ve tried to give people what I think we need, which is thoroughness, respect for scientific expertise, respect for the provisionality of science, a little bit of skeptical humor,” he said. “And respect for a diversity of opinions.”

Another threat to the genre, more prosaic but no less consequential, is that the economics of it aren’t quite working out.

In quick succession after I left Quammen’s company, a gifted, entrepreneurial freelancer, Marion Renault—maybe the younger science writer I most admire—posted a series of tweets about how financial insecurity and the overall precarity of their work had forced them to step back from the business. Then Gimlet Media laid off the staff of a climate podcast. A few weeks earlier, six editors had been laid off at National Geographic, the outlet that about two decades ago had offered Quammen three round-trip business-class tickets to Africa for the story that spawned the idea that led to Spillover and subsequently Breathless. (He opted to fly coach instead and do more reporting, he said. Learning about that era in journalism felt like learning that in the Carboniferous Period, there had been so much oxygen in the air that dragonflies could have two-foot wingspans, I said.)

After the rock, we moved to a nearby parking lot, then started hiking uphill, Quammen testing out a pair of surgically replaced knees. On the way back down he pointed out to me a tiny spruce tree growing, improbably, atop a boulder. It reminded him of a landscape in Yellowstone National Park, a place where he has reported extensively, and where he would have taken me if recent, extreme rains hadn’t washed away parts of the most convenient road.

He described it instead. A wide open valley of grass and scattered boulders called “glacial erratics.” Each boulder has one tree nestled up right next to it, as if the rock had slid into a tree and stopped. “What does that represent?” he asked. “It represents the fact that this is such a severe environment that a Douglas fir cannot get started through the sapling phase without a rock to hide behind.”

Not to overburden those trees in that valley, but later the idea of the tree nurseries seemed to represent a lot of things, among them both the fragments of wonder still left in the natural world and the persistence of a scattered few good science writers to examine what’s happening out there. The tall, established trees were hanging on; for any new ones to have any chance, though, they needed luck, privilege, shelter. We kept walking. I asked him what he thought the fate of that ecosystem might be.

“It may be that you come through there 40 years from now, and you see all these big glacial erratics and standing next to each one of them is a dead snag of a previously living Douglas fir,” he said. We continued down, and I continued to prod him about science writing in a world ruled by more and more unhinged ecological, evolutionary, and environmental cycles, and he gently pushed back.

“Things are still funny, and joyous, and wonderful,” he said, turning out to the healthy forest around us. “This day—this day is not sad.”

Read the full story here.
Photos courtesy of

Mary Cleave, NASA’s Pioneering Astronaut and Scientist, Dies at 76

Mary Cleave, a pioneering NASA astronaut who embarked on two spaceflights and later became the first woman to lead NASA’s Science Mission Directorate, has passed...

Retired NASA astronaut Mary Cleave, known for her two spaceflights and leadership in NASA’s Science Mission Directorate, has died at 76. Her notable achievements include the Magellan Venus mission and numerous NASA awards. (Official NASA portrait of astronaut Mary L. Cleave.) Credit: NASA Mary Cleave, a pioneering NASA astronaut who embarked on two spaceflights and later became the first woman to lead NASA’s Science Mission Directorate, has passed away at 76. She made significant contributions to space exploration, including the deployment of the Magellan Venus spacecraft, and received multiple awards for her service. Retired NASA astronaut Mary Cleave, a veteran of two NASA spaceflights, died November 27. She was 76. A scientist with training in civil and environmental engineering, as well as biological sciences and microbial ecology, Cleave was the first woman to serve as an associate administrator for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate. Born in Southampton, New York, Cleave received a Bachelor of Science degree in biological sciences from Colorado State University, Fort Collins, in 1969, and Master of Science in microbial ecology and a doctorate in civil and environmental engineering, both from Utah State University, Logan, in 1975 and 1979, respectively. “I’m sad we’ve lost trailblazer Dr. Mary Cleave, shuttle astronaut, veteran of two spaceflights, and first woman to lead the Science Mission Directorate as associate administrator,” said NASA Associate Administrator Bob Cabana. “Mary was a force of nature with a passion for science, exploration, and caring for our home planet. She will be missed.” Former NASA astronaut Mary Cleave speaks during an astronaut panel discussion at the 70th International Astronautical Congress, Friday, Oct. 25, 2019, at the Walter E. Washington Convention Center in Washington. Credit: NASA/Aubrey Gemignani) Cleave was selected as an astronaut in May 1980. Her technical assignments included flight software verification in the SAIL (Shuttle Avionics Integration Laboratory), spacecraft communicator on five space shuttle flights, and malfunctions procedures book and crew equipment design. Cleave launched on her first mission, STS-61B, aboard space shuttle Atlantis on November 26, 1985. During the flight, the crew deployed communications satellites, conducted two six-hour spacewalks to demonstrate space station construction techniques, operated the Continuous Flow Electrophoresis experiment for McDonnell Douglas and a Getaway Special container for Telesat and tested the Orbiter Experiments Digital Autopilot. The crew assigned to the STS-61B mission included (kneeling left to right) Bryan D. O’conner, pilot; and Brewster H. Shaw, commander. On the back row, left to right, are Charles D. Walker, payload specialist; mission specialists Jerry L. Ross, Mary L. Cleave, and Sherwood C. Spring; and Rodolpho Neri Vela, payload specialist. Credit: NASA Cleave’s second mission, STS-30, which also was on Atlantis, launched May 4, 1989. It was a four-day flight during which the crew successfully deployed the Magellan Venus exploration spacecraft, the first planetary probe to be deployed from a space shuttle. Magellan arrived at Venus in August 1990 and mapped more than 95% of the surface. In addition, the crew also worked on secondary payloads involving indium crystal growth, electrical storms, and Earth observation studies. Cleave transferred from NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston to the agency’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland in May 1991. There, she worked in the Laboratory for Hydrospheric Processes as the project manager for SeaWiFS (Sea-viewing, Wide-Field-of-view-Sensor), an ocean color sensor that monitored vegetation globally. Moments after ignition, Space Shuttle Atlantis heads for a four-day mission in Earth-orbit with five astronaut crew members aboard. Onboard were astronauts David M. Walker, Ronald J. Grabe, Norman E. Thagard, Mary L. Cleave, and Mark C. Lee. Launch occurred at 2:46:58 p.m. (EDT), May 4, 1989. Credit: NASA In March 2000, she went to serve as deputy associate administrator for advanced planning in the Office of Earth Science at NASA’s Headquarters in Washington. From August 2005 to February 2007, Cleave was the associate administrator for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate where she guided an array of research and scientific exploration programs for planet Earth, space weather, the solar system, and the universe. She also oversaw an assortment of grant-based research programs and a diverse constellation of spacecraft, from small, principal investigator-led missions to large flagship missions. Cleave’s awards included: two NASA Space Flight medals; two NASA Exceptional Service medals; an American Astronautical Society Flight Achievement Award; a NASA Exceptional Achievement Medal; and NASA Engineer of the Year. Cleave retired from NASA in February 2007.

These Male Stick Insects Aren't 'Errors' After All

Some female stick insects can reproduce without males—but they have a secret

December 1, 20232 min readThese Male Stick Insects Aren’t ‘Errors’ After AllSome female stick insects can reproduce without males—but they have a secretBy Saugat BolakheTimema poppense, a species related to the stick insects studied in the new work. Credit: Moritz Muschick/University of SheffieldCertain wingless, sticklike insects that hide in bushes and trees across central California have no need for males: these insects in the Timema genus are nearly all female and reproduce without sex by creating genetic clones of themselves, a process called parthenogenesis.But entomologists occasionally stumble on male Timema insects, which seem to have no reproductive function. “We initially assumed that the males were just errors, as loss of a single X chromosome can result in an egg developing into a male,” says ecologist Susana Freitas, who led the study while working at the University of Lausanne in Switzerland.Freitas and her team found that the uncommon males may engage in infrequent flings with the females. This “cryptic sex” introduces genetic diversity into stick insect populations and might aid their long-term survival. The team's genetic analysis was recently published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B.Parthenogenesis (meaning “virgin birth”) is common among invertebrates and even occurs in some species of birds, lizards and snakes. For some, it's a last resort when mating options are limited; for others, it's their only method of reproduction. But creating offspring through cloning results in low genetic diversity, leaving a population vulnerable to harmful mutations and limiting its ability to adapt to environmental changes.To examine the genetic diversity of the stick insects, researchers extracted DNA from females and rare males in eight Timema populations across four species. They then tracked the position of various genetic markers in each insect. These markers stay linked on chromosomes during asexual reproduction but are reshuffled with another individual's genes during sexual reproduction.Most offspring genetically resembled their female parents. But offspring in two Timema species showed greater genetic diversity and fewer linked genes, indicating cryptic sexual relations. Tellingly, the genetic profiles of the uncommon males matched what would be expected from a rare sexual encounter.The discovery “reinforces the hypothesis that many of the species previously thought to be anciently asexual in fact engage in sexual reproduction or other forms of genetic exchange,” says Olga Vakhrusheva, an evolutionary biologist at the Skolkovo Institute of Science and Technology in Moscow, who was not involved in the new work.These rare interactions, also known to occur among small crustaceans and water invertebrates, “could be helping to wash away any deleterious mutations,” says Alexis L. Sperling, a crop scientist at the University of Cambridge, who also was not involved in the new study. She notes that many agricultural pests such as aphids, wasps and flies reproduce asexually. Cryptic sex or similar strategies could help these pests thrive, Sperling suggests— “but we need more research to be sure.”

The ancient origins of cannabis and our changing attitudes towards it

Cannabis attitudes are undergoing a seismic shift but what do really know about the drug? Our three-part special podcast series is uncovering the science of marijuana

Cannabis related items on display at Housing Works, New York’s first legal cannabis dispensaryErik Pendzich/Shutterstock Cannabis is having a moment. Half of Americans live in a state with legal marijuana and 9 in 10 people nationwide support legalisation in some form. This is a stark difference from mere decades ago, when prohibition was the norm in the entire US. Meanwhile, if you live in Malta, Uruguay, Canada – and maybe soon, Germany – your entire country is one with legal recreational pot. And access to medical marijuana extends to even more countries, including the UK and Australia. But as medical and recreational use become more popular and increasingly accessible, how exactly did we get to this moment of change? What has research been able to tell us – so far – about how the plant produces its euphoric effects, or what medical purposes it may be able to serve or how it might be harmful? And how could our relationship with this unassuming leaf change in coming decades? In the first episode of a special 3-part podcast series, Christie Taylor and the rest of the New Scientist reporting team start at the beginning: 27.8 million years ago, when hops and hemp diverged in family Cannabaceae. A million years ago, when Cannabis indica and Cannabis sativa diverged into two differently psychoactive strains. And 12,000 years ago, when humans first domesticated cannabis for mundane household use, not yet dreaming of the euphoric experiences to come. But of course, it all comes back to the high, and we go there too – the evidence, though still sparse, of drug-related use dating back at least to 500 BC. And, a thousand years later, perhaps the first recorded reference to a ritual not unlike hotboxing. To listen, subscribe to New Scientist Weekly or visit our podcast page. The science of cannabis As the use of marijuana and its compounds rises around the world, New Scientist explores the latest research on the medical potential of cannabis, how it is grown and its environmental impact, the way cannabis affects our bodies and minds and what the marijuana of the future will look like. Transcript Christie Taylor: It’s a sunny November morning in Manhattan and I’m buying weed for my job. Sasha Nugent: So right now, we have pre-rolls, tinctures, flower, edibles, and drinks, and that’s an array of things that we have. Vapes as well. We have flower and we offer it in eighth and one ounces, and we even have a three ounce bag, and three ounce is the max in New York that you’re able to purchase in a day. Christie Taylor: That’s Sasha Nugent. She’s the so-called ‘Budmaster’ at Housing Works Cannabis Co. It’s the retail extension of a local AIDS non-profit and also the first recreational dispensary to be licensed in New York City, and if you’ve never been inside a licensed dispensary before, you may be shocked at how normal a retail experience it feels like. Two big display cases wrap around the retail area filled with colourful packages of merchandise, like gummies infused with THC, the main ingredient that gets people high, or CBD, a secondary ingredient that seems to have a more calming, chill effect. Pastel rainbow signs next to the row of cash registers have slogans like ‘make love, not drug war’, and ‘spark up your inner activist’, and ‘we’re smoking out stigma’. The product labels range from slightly goofy and psychedelic to what I can only describe as a colourful fruit salad, and for the Apple Store types, there’s sleek and minimalist black and white packaging. Sasha Nugent: On a slow day, anywhere from, like, Sunday to Wednesday, we see about 550 to 700 people depending on the day. On our busier days, Thursday through Saturday, we can see upwards of 1,000 unique customers. Christie Taylor: The normality of this experience has only become possible recently. New York State only legalised recreational cannabis in 2021. Other states went sooner and there has been a dramatic wave of various degrees of legalisation across the US, and even across the world. We are in a new normal when it comes to cannabis, but what do we really know about the science of it? Where did the plant come from? What does it do to our health, for good or for bad? I’m Christie Taylor. I’m a podcast producer for New Scientist, and this is the first episode in our three-part series about the science of cannabis, how we got here, what we know, and what the future may hold. This is part of a huge month-long reporting effort from more than half a dozen journalists and you can read their work over at newscientist.com/cannabis. We’ve investigated cannabis and creativity, mapped the still languishing landscape of medical research, and questioned the environmental cost of industrial scale hemp harvests, but today I’m starting at the beginning, how we got to this moment where I can walk into a store, buy a federally controlled substance, and just tell you about it, and why our relationship with cannabis is possibly one of the oldest relationships our species has had with a domesticated plant.  If you want to feel really old, it’s been 87 years since the movie Reefer Madness debuted. It’s a hyperbolic fictional warning about young people driven to psychosis with multiple murders and deaths all because they had some weed. ‘These high school boys and girls are having a hop at the local soda fountain, innocent of a new and deadly menace lurking behind closed doors.’ (Advert played 03.25-03.32). But now, walk through many neighbourhoods in New York City and you’ll see something you didn’t used to, storefront after storefront with names like ‘Magic Garden’, ‘Smacked Village’, ‘Weed World’, or just ‘Gotham’. The fonts run from cartoonish to classy, and storefront signs, as in other cities with legal recreational and medical weed, will advertise under no uncertain circumstances that they have THC, CBD, or just the unmistakeable green seven-pointed leaf shape that screams ‘marijuana’. In states with legal cannabis, medical or otherwise, you can speak frankly with salespeople about dosages and strains. Do you want help sleeping, or daytime relaxation, pain or appetite management, or a sense of calm while getting your work done? Or do you just want to get stoned off your ass, watch some dumb TV, and laugh uncontrollably while making up new words for hedgehog? No judgement. No, really. Please, no judgement. Sasha Nugent: I am just like you. I have trouble sleeping and I also have anxiety, so after, like, a day at work, I love the Offline from Off Hours. Like, they don’t pay me. That’s one of my favourite ones. Christie Taylor: Outside the dispensaries, at corner stores and bodegas, you can still buy THC-infused seltzers and mocktails, cannabis cocktails, and skin lotions featuring CBD. In states like Wisconsin that haven’t legalised cannabis, purveyors get around it with a less potent form of THC called Delta-8. It’s derived from non-psychoactive cannabis and so remains, for now, legal in the US through a loophole in a 2018 agriculture law. Some of the greater glow of legality is in the name of medical applications, which are very real but still under investigation in the case of some treatments. In states where weed is legal only in medical contexts, your doctor can still usually get you a dispensary card for ALS, Parkinson’s disease, chronic pain, cancer and chemo side effects, and mental health conditions like PTSD, and the number of people enrolled in medical marijuana programmes in the US? It more than quadrupled between 2016 and 2020 to a whopping 3 million. People use it for nausea, pain, and glaucoma symptoms. It’s showing legitimate promise as a treatment for multiple sclerosis and rare forms of epilepsy, but when we look at this moment in our relationship with cannabis, it’s also clear that the years of prohibition have cost us research. Because the US federal government still bans weed, scientists have struggled for funding, or simply a sufficient legal supply to study.  The late Dr. Raphael Mechoulam, the Israeli scientist who first isolated THC from cannabis in the 1950s, he even had to get his first samples from the police, and as its therapeutic potential gains greater excitement, the federal ban on weed is still undermining scientific research that might bring clarity on both the benefits and the risks of its consumption. This research is needed more than ever. At Housing Works, I’m presented with three seemingly equal products, gummy edibles, that might help me sleep better. They all advertise their properties in terms of milligrams of THC and other calming compounds, so I pick one called Snoozeberry solely by the promise that it would taste like blueberry, a flavour I liked, and I’m charmed maybe just a little bit by the twinkling stars on the soothing deep blue packaging. Sasha Nugent: Perfect. So this is your receipt, and would you like a bag? Christie Taylor: Yes, I’ll take a bag. Sasha Nugent: No problem. I’ll grab one for you. Christie Taylor: Okay. Sasha Nugent: So we also offer delivery, so I put a delivery flyer in case you’re in one of our delivery zones, and I also put a little sticker with our QR code in case you want to order it in advance. Christie Taylor: Alright. Thank you so much. Sasha Nugent: Thank you so much. It was great meeting you. Christie Taylor: Yes, great meeting you too. You’re not high. A revolution has been baking toward the popularity and acceptance of weed. Legalisation of cannabis for recreational use has swung hugely into favour in the last 10 years. Uruguay legalised recreational use of marijuana in 2013, Canada in 2018, Malta 2021. Lawmakers in Germany may soon vote on a bill to do the same, and medical marijuana is even more widely legalised, including in the UK and Australia. In the US, there’s no national approval of cannabis in any context. Instead, it’s a state by state patchwork, but one that is increasingly pro-pot, with 38 states and Washington, DC all moving to legalise marijuana. Nearly half of those are states that support both medical and recreational use, including, just weeks ago, the state of Ohio, and if you ask we, the people, there’s overwhelming support for national legalisation. Nearly 7 in 10 Americans say ‘yes’. Alexis Wnuk: That’s actually triple what it was 30 years ago. Christie Taylor: New Scientist’s Alexis Wnuk dug into the data explaining this shift and she found the swing in attitudes is even more dramatic than that. Alexis Wnuk: So if you ask people specifically about recreational and medical uses, it’s more like 9 in 10 people in favour of legalising it in some capacity. Younger people and those on the political left continue to support legalisation in greater numbers than older people and people on the political right, but we’ve seen a surge in support across all age groups and the entire political spectrum. Christie Taylor: Republican support, while still quite a bit lower than other groups, tripled between 1990 and 2016. This also seems to align with a shift in how people perceive the dangers of cannabis. For the 50 years that the US has tracked these perceptions, people have always seen cannabis as less dangerous than drugs like cocaine or heroin, but in the early 2000s, that gap got even bigger. Alexis Wnuk: Around 20% of people surveyed in 1997 said that smoking marijuana once or twice a week posed minimal or no risk of harm, but by 2021, which is the most recent data we have, half of people surveyed thought this, and we know this wasn’t just because perceptions of all drugs were changing, because people still ranked other drugs at about the same level of danger as they did 30 years ago. Christie Taylor: So why have people swung so comparatively hard for cannabis in recent decades? The biggest reason is medical marijuana. If you look back at the surveys, 98% of people who supported legalisation said that medical use was a very important or somewhat important reason why. Alexis Wnuk: In the 1980s and ’90s, we started seeing studies that suggested cannabis could reduce nausea and improve appetite in people with HIV (TC 00:10:00) and in those undergoing chemotherapy for cancer, and this started creeping into the national conversation on marijuana. I came across a study from 2019 by researchers at John Jay College here in New York City where they tracked media coverage of marijuana over the years. They took the New York Times, one of the most read newspapers in the nation, as a case study, and what they found was that in the late ’90s, articles about medical use of cannabis started making up more and more of the coverage. At the same time, there’s less and less coverage dealing with marijuana trafficking or abuse. Christie Taylor: Headlines about multimillion-dollar pot busts declined. You were more likely to see stories like the 1993 headline about a 79 year old woman who was growing weed to help her son, who had multiple sclerosis, eat better, or a pot-smoking club in San Francisco reserved for the sick and dying. 1996 is also when you saw California become the first state to allow cannabis for medicinal purposes with a doctor’s supervision. Alexis Wnuk: Obviously, we can’t know for sure whether the media coverage actually changed people’s attitudes or whether it was just following the shift in attitudes but what we do know is that, in this time period, we saw a big uptick in coverage of medical marijuana and the people who could benefit from it, so instead of fearmongering and crime, you were much more likely to see a focus on compassionate use for people who were critically ill. Christie Taylor: There are a lot of other reasons ranking highly as well. Nearly as important for some people was freeing up law enforcement to do other work, followed by the argument that it’s someone’s personal choice to consume it. Deeper in the survey data, there’s support for the argument that tax revenue from legal weed could support local governments, or that it just might be safer to have legal oversight for weed, and if you go back to the perceptions of risk, there were people that said that using weed is already safe and so there’s no reason to outlaw it. Half of Americans now live in a state with legal recreational cannabis and there’s no sign that the wave is slowing down. The thing is, the weed zeitgeist, this wave of stigma oscillating into mania, isn’t the first time that our species has used this plant, whether for highs or healing. It’s one of the first crops human beings ever cultivated, starting 12,000 years ago. Think the oldest profession but make it agriculture, and until 100 years ago, it was one of our species most important sources of fibre, shelved only thanks to the rise of synthetic fibres such as nylon, but what was cannabis doing before humans met hemp? First, we should also talk about humulus, marijuana’s cousin in family Cannabaceae. You know it as hops, which flavours our beer, but fossils of the two plants have been confused for each other numerous times over the years, which is why genetics may be the better arbiter of when hops and herb diverted in the evolutionary tree. The evolution of plants like cannabis is hard to study. You need fossils, and soft matter doesn’t make the same impressions in stone that bones or teeth might, but the traces do exist and modern genomic science is also increasingly helping us use living plants to scry backward in time. It’s a kind of timekeeping that relies on mutations. A molecular clock. Scientists can count how many mutations the two plants have gathered over time and use that to determine that hops and cannabis diverted into separate species around 27.8 million years ago. Hops went on to become a funky-smelling climbing plant integral to beer but not particularly psychoactive on its own, but cannabis? It’s a funky-smelling, wind-pollinated, herbaceous ground plant that’s rich in oils and protein. It gets you high and it slows you down, and as fossil pollen indicates, it may have originally evolved on the Tibetan plateau at dizzying elevations with an arid climate and harsh, inhospitable levels of UV radiation from the Sun. Chelsea Whyte tracked down this high-elevation history. Chelsea Whyte: This also may be why the plant possesses its calming properties. THC and CBD, as well as other cannabinoids, seem to protect plants from UV rays, and cannabis may have developed these compounds as an adaptation to its early habitat. Christie Taylor: And then there’s the question of cannabis sativa and cannabis indica. Seasoned pot consumers know these two psychoactive species of cannabis can feel very different in the body and brain but the fact that you can be discerning down to the level of Latin names might not have anything to do with human husbandry. The same molecular clock method of genetic analysis shows that indica and sativa diverged more than 1 million years ago, back when our distant ancestor, homo habilis, was hunting on the plains of Africa. Chelsea Whyte: We’d had tools for about 1.5 million years at that point. That’s what homo habilis was known for, but we haven’t found any evidence for those long ago ancestors consuming cannabis in any way, nor is there evidence that cannabis had particularly high levels of THC at the time, so while it’s fun to wonder if there were Stone Age stoners, there’s no actual sign of it. Christie Taylor: What we do find is evidence of human cultivation 12,000 years ago in East Asia, by people who seemed to use the plant for ordinary household needs. Oil, rope, bow strings. We know this because while the original wild strain we started with may be extinct, it’s closest living relative seems to be in Northwest China and the genomic record matches the archaeological. There’s pottery that’s been marked by hemp cords dating from the same millennium, for example, and once we began to cultivate cannabis, it spread, and spread, and spread. Chelsea Whyte: It’s almost cliché at this point to say there’s a reason it’s called weed because it flourishes in a wide variety of conditions and doesn’t need too much tending. Whenever groups of people exchanged goods with others, cannabis went too. Farmers, trade, conquest, you name it. Christie Taylor: It started about 5,000 years ago when the Yamnaya people migrated from the Eurasian Steppe and brought cannabis to parts of Europe and the Middle East. A thousand years later, pot entered Korea through trade with China, and South Asia via Indo-Aryan peoples migrating from central Asia. Chelsea Whyte: Around 2000 BC, the western Eurasian Steppe was home to a nomadic people called the Scythians, and they carried it on horseback from the Middle East to what is now Russia and Ukraine. Christie Taylor: Germanic tribes took it west to Britain as the Anglo-Saxons conquered. It was in Northern Africa by 1400 AD and spread from there to the southern tip, and then, as European colonialism so well facilitated, cannabis crossed the Atlantic and spread across North and South America. We’ll talk more in a future episode about the current state of medical uses of cannabis and what we know about them. At the moment, the earliest evidence of therapeutic use dates back to a Chinese shaman who was buried with a stash of cannabis sativa in 700 BC, but medical records suggest people have been trying to heal with cannabis for thousands of years, starting 5,000 years ago in the reign of Chinese emperor Shennong. He claimed cannabis could cure a wide range of ailments such as malaria, menstrual problems, and gout, and maybe paradoxically, he prescribed it for absent-mindedness as well. Western doctors weren’t using cannabis until much more recently, the late 19th and early 20th century, when one of Queen Victoria’s doctors used the plant to treat a wide variety of pain-related illnesses, including some of her premenstrual symptoms. The drug was even listed in the US Pharmacopeia, the country’s official compendium of medical drug information, but then it was outlawed in 1942, decades into a rising crackdown and prohibition of the plant. We wouldn’t come full circle again until 1996, when California residents passed Proposition 215 and made medical marijuana legal again. So when, you ask, did we start getting stoned? Was it the Stone Age or was it much later? Was there a single moment when early humans inhaled some skunky sativa smoke and realised they felt pretty dope about it? Chelsea Whyte: The evidence here is pretty spotty but we know that wild cannabis plants have only trace amounts of the psychoactive compounds that get us giddy, including THC and CBD, so researchers have looked for evidence of plants with higher concentrations which we would have had to cultivate specifically. Christie Taylor: We have a long, long history with this plant but only 4,000 years ago do we start to see the evidence of humans nurturing specific strains for specific purposes, whether for fibre or drugs. Chelsea Whyte: You can actually see in the way different strains diverge what uses they were bred for. Those bred for fibre have more gene mutations that inhibit the stems from branching out, so they have taller stems and more fibre in the main stem, but the plants that were bred for drug use have mutations supporting more branching, which also means more flowers. Those plants are shorter but they also tend to have more THC. Christie Taylor: Beyond Emperor Shennong’s medicinal mention 4,500 years ago, the first trace of toking only emerged in 2019 in the mountains of Western China. Researchers exploring ancient tombs found wooden fire pits called braziers with traces of THC at much, much higher concentrations than in wild cannabis. These date back to 500 BC, 2,500 years ago, and they suggest that people at that time were inhaling the potent smoke of a strain of cannabis that they had cultivated specifically for the high, but instead of the joints, pipes or bongs you may be familiar with, these braziers would likely have been filled with red hot pebbles that the cannabis was then put on top of. The smoke from the smouldering plant could then be inhaled. And remember those Scythians marauding through Russia and Ukraine on horseback? The Greek geographer and historian Herodotus, writing in the 5th century AD, describes a ritual that may be the first recorded instance of hotboxing. Herodotus: ‘They set up three poles leaning together to a point, and cover these over with woollen mats. Then, in the place so enclosed, to the best of their power, they make a pit in the centre beneath the poles and the mats, (TC 00:20:00) and throw red hot stones into it. The Scythians then take the seed of this hemp and, creeping under the mats, they throw it on the red hot stones, and being so thrown, it smoulders and sends forth so much steam that no Greek vapour bath could surpass it. The Scythians howl in their joy at the vapour bath.’ Christie Taylor: So weed has been with us for 12,000 years and we’ve found it at least some level of therapeutic for 4,500 of those years. People have used, and continue to use, it for physical ailments, emotional balm, and a certain mental letting loose, but as the wave of cannabis legalisation in the US and worldwide gathers momentum, what do we actually know about how it affects us, body and brain? Stay tuned for the next episode where we’ll look at what happens to your brain on drugs, and what the past prohibitions on pot have done to limit our knowledge of how it behaves, even as the need for that knowledge is greater than ever.  As I mentioned earlier, this podcast is part of a massive reporting effort, spanning many months of work from the New Scientist team. You can go to newscientist.com/cannabis to read much, much more about the history of our relationship with weed and what research is starting to reveal. Thanks to Chelsea Whyte, Alexis Wnuk, and Grace Wade for helping me research and write this episode, and to Timothy Revell and Chelsea Whyte for edits. Thanks also to Timothy Revell for his expert voice acting. New York studio production is by Hugo Fonseca, and our audio and sound design is by Ollie Guillou. I’m Christie Taylor. Bye for now.

MIT’s Science Policy Initiative holds 13th annual Executive Visit Days

MIT students traveled to Washington to speak to representatives from several federal executive agencies.

From Oct. 23-24, a delegation consisting of 21 MIT students, one MIT postdoc, and four students from the University of the District of Columbia met in Washington for the MIT Science Policy Initiative’s Executive Visit Days (ExVD). Now in its 13th cycle, this trip offers a platform where university students and young researchers can connect with officials and scientists from different federal agencies, discuss issues related to science and technology policy, and learn about the role the federal government plays in addressing these issues. The delegation visited seven different agencies, as well as the MIT Washington Office, where the group held virtual calls with personnel from the National Institutes of Health and the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health. Visits to the National Science Foundation, Department of Energy Office of Science, White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP), Environmental Protection Agency, and National Aeronautics and Space Administration then followed over the course of two days. The series of meetings, facilitated by the MIT Science Policy Initiative (SPI), offered a window into the current activities of each agency and how individuals can engage with science policy through the lens of each particular agency. The Science Policy Initiative is an organization of students and postdocs whose core goal is not only to grow interest at MIT and in the community at large in science policy, but also to facilitate the exchange of ideas between the policymakers of today and the scientists of tomorrow. One of the various trips organized by SPI every year, ExVD allows students to gain insight into the work of federal agencies, while also offering the chance to meet with representatives from these agencies, many of whom are MIT alumni, and discuss their paths toward careers in science policy. Additionally, ExVD serves as an opportunity for participants to network with students, postdocs, and professionals outside of their fields but united by common interests in science policy.  “I believe it is critical for students with vital technical expertise to gain a sense of the realities of policymaking,” says Phillip Christoffersen, a PhD student researching AI in MIT’s Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and SPI ExVD 2023 chair. “Due to the many complexities of modern life, we are simultaneously reaching tipping points in many fields — AI, climate change, biotechnology, among many others. For this reason, science and science policy must increasingly move in lockstep for the good of society, and it falls on us as scientists-in-training to make that happen.” One example of the delegation’s visits was to the White House OSTP, located directly next to the West Wing at the Eisenhower Executive Office Building. This special agency of fewer than 200 staff, most of whom are either in rotation or on loan from other federal agencies, directly reports to the president on all matters related to science and policy. The atmosphere at the White House complex and the exchanges with Kei Koizumi, principal deputy director for policy at OSTP, deeply inspired the students and showcased the vast impact science can have on federal policy. The overall sentiment among the ExVD participants has been that of reborn motivation, having become inspired to participate in policy matters, either as a portion of their graduate research or in their future career. The ExVD 2023 cohort is thankful to the MIT Washington office, whose generous support was crucial to making this trip a reality. Furthermore, the delegation thanks the MIT Science Policy Initiative’s leadership team for organizing this trip, enabling an extremely meaningful experience.

‘They’re inherently charismatic’: the amateur sleuths hooked on sea slugs

More and more enthusiasts have fallen in love with this relative of garden dwellers, and are helping ocean science while they’re at itTwo years ago, Libby Keatley was diving off the coast of County Antrim in Northern Ireland when she spotted something unusual. It was a sea slug – or nudibranch – whose transparent body had orange lines running through it and twiggy projections arranged along its back. “It was quite distinctive and not like anything I’d seen before,” she says.Keatley called over her diving buddy, Bernard Picton, a local marine biologist and pioneer in UK sea slug studies. He scooped it up in a plastic bag and, back at his lab, confirmed it was a newly discovered species. He named it in Keatley’s honour: Dendronotus keatleyae. Continue reading...

Two years ago, Libby Keatley was diving off the coast of County Antrim in Northern Ireland when she spotted something unusual. It was a sea slug – or nudibranch – whose transparent body had orange lines running through it and twiggy projections arranged along its back. “It was quite distinctive and not like anything I’d seen before,” she says.Keatley called over her diving buddy, Bernard Picton, a local marine biologist and pioneer in UK sea slug studies. He scooped it up in a plastic bag and, back at his lab, confirmed it was a newly discovered species. He named it in Keatley’s honour: Dendronotus keatleyae.Facelina auriculata in its natural habitat. Photograph: Libby Keatley“Three years ago, I didn’t really know what a nudibranch was or I thought they only lived in tropical countries,” says Keatley. “It just shows you can learn – you don’t have to be somebody who’s been in a lab for 20 years to know that something looks a bit funny or different.”For a niche but growing group of amateur naturalists, sea slugs have become an ideal subject: as stunning as butterflies but with the good grace to sit still while you peer in close and take a photograph. Distant relatives of the slimy, drab land-dwellers that live in gardens, sea slugs are an altogether more endearing bunch. Many are daubed in jewel-like colours that warn off predators. Others take on hues to blend in with their surroundings, often gaudy seaweeds and sponges.There are also plenty of sea slugs to discover in UK waters, with about 150 known species across the north Atlantic. And being so small – generally under a finger’s width – there’s a thrill to be had in spotting one. “That’s what I love about them,” says Keatley.To show me why the hobby has attracted a worldwide community of scuba divers and amateur photographers – and how it makes important contributions to scientists’ understanding of how our oceans are changing – Keatley takes me diving in Strangford Lough. An hour’s drive south of Belfast, it is one of Europe’s largest sea inlets and a renowned wildlife spot, home to seabirds, seals and recently a pair of bottlenose dolphins.There’s even more going on beneath the waterline. At high tide, the Irish Sea brings in a soup of particles and nutrients which feeds a rich mix of underwater species – and a host of other creatures that feed on them.Keatley gazes out across the unpromising green, murky water. “There’s a whole other world just under the surface,” she assures me.Slideshow of different species of sea slugSea slugs: 1 Amphorina (orange with yellow-tipped cerata); 2 Facelina auriculata (white with pinkish cerata); 3 Hancockia uncinata (red); 4 Trinchesia caerulea (white with blue and orange cerata); 5 Diaphorodoris luteocincta (with a yellow ring pattern); 6 Coryphella chriskaugei (white with pink-orange cerata); 7 Polycera quadrilineata (translucent white with yellow spots); 8 Edmundsella pedata (bright pink).We are joined on the dive by Keatley’s partner and fellow enthusiast, Phil Wilkinson, and Picton, who recently updated a guidebook to sea slugs of the north Atlantic with Christine Morrow, who is keeping watch from the shore. “I think the nudibranchs are very easy to get people hooked,” she says. “There’s something inherently charismatic about them.”We squeeze into dry suits, neoprene gloves and hoods, heave on scuba gear and lead weights, then lumber into the water. Ten metres down, the sea is a face-numbing 10C and I can see no further than a few metres. But after a few minutes, Keatley points out a tiny sea slug that looks like a cluster of powder-pink raspberries.I think we’re in a golden age of really understanding the importance of citizen scienceTerry Gosliner, nudibranch expertWe find more sea slugs than I’ve ever seen, even in tropical seas: neon pink ones and transparent ones covered with finger-like projections with shiny turquoise tips; another is white with yellow specks and a pair of bunny ears that are for smelling not hearing. We encounter a gathering of sea slugs that look like miniature fried eggs splashed in chilli sauce, and Keatley points out a peach-coloured specimen hitching a ride on a hermit crab. It feeds on minute hydroids – stinging relatives of jellyfish – that grow on the crab’s shell.For Keatley, sea slug spotting was part of an unexpected reawakening of a childhood interest in nature. In January 2019, she learned to scuba dive and was an instant convert to the underwater world. “I couldn’t get enough,” she says. “The more I saw, the more I wanted to learn, and then the more I was seeing. So it just snowballed a wee bit.”Keen to share the enchanting wildlife with friends and family, Keatley got a waterproof camera and began posting images on Instagram. She gets help in identifying species from other enthusiasts and exerts on Facebook groups.Marine biologist Bernard Picton, Helen Scales, and sea slug enthusiasts Libby Keatley and Phil Wilkinson before their dive into Strangford Lough. Photograph: Christine PictonWithin a year she was a fully qualified diver and started volunteering with the Northern Ireland branch of Seasearch, a citizen science group of divers and snorkelers who gather information about species and habitats. Data from their surveys are checked for accuracy then fed into a national biodiversity database, NBN Atlas.“On the first dive I went on with Seasearch I thought, ‘I’ve found where I want to be. These people are interested in the same things as me,’” says Keatley. “I wanted to give something back and do something useful for this place that I love.”Throughout summer and autumn, she and fellow Seasearch divers carry out underwater surveys of the Northern Ireland coasts at least once a month. It was during one of these, in 2021, that Keatley found the new species of sea slug. Between dives, she helps organise online talks and workshops to teach volunteers identification and photography skills.Dendronotus keatleyae, the new species of sea slug Keatley spotted off the coast of Northern Ireland. Photograph: Libby KeatleyTerry Gosliner, a veteran nudibranch specialist from the California Academy of Sciences, has helped name hundreds of species. He champions ordinary people who are helping to find and study sea slugs. “We don’t have enough scientists to observe what’s going on,” he says.Citizen science has a long history, especially among British amateur naturalists such as Charles Darwin. It’s now taking off – for sea slugs and more generally – Gosliner thinks, because of all the internet forums, Facebook groups and online communities such as iNaturalist that allow experts and amateurs to work together to identify and map species. There are also underwater photographic competitions and “shootouts” with special categories for the best nudibranch pictures. Citizen scientists can see the direct results of their observations, which makes them more likely to stick with it, Gosliner notes. “I think we’re in a golden age of really understanding the importance of citizen science.”This is not just about finding new species but also documenting their movements as the planet heats – and sea slugs are on the move. In August 2022, a rainbow-coloured sea slug was seen by a Seasearch diver in the Isles of Scilly, a first for the UK. The species is commonly found in France, Spain and Portugal and was spotted again in May this year, in a rockpool on a beach in Falmouth.Last June, Keatley spotted a sea slug off the coast of County Donegal in north-west Ireland that previously was only recorded as far north in the UK as Pembrokeshire.“If you know your nudibranchs at all, it’s quite distinctive. It’s not as if you would confuse it with anything else,” she says.Gosliner says citizen scientists are often the first to notice species showing up in unexpected places. “We rely on ordinary people,” he says, “who have strong interests and strong expertise, to help make those observations and be the sentinels of environmental change.”

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