Liz

Moses came down from mountain to deliver the commandments to his people, the Israelites. Moses said: “God has promised, for your suffering, that he will deliver you to a land flowing with milk and honey—”

But Moses could not finish, for a murmur rose up from the people led by Moses. Now there was a disturbance. One man of Israel asked: “Did you say flowing with milk and with honey?”

And Moses was a bit angry and said: “Yes, flowing with milk and honey.”

“Just making sure,” the man said.

But from behind the speaker, the people of Israel whispered and one friend who knew the man well enough poked him in the back pretty hard, nudging him forward. And so the man said: “Well, actually, some people are asking about if maybe the land flowing with milk and honey, you know, also has oat milk? Did God say anything about that? About oat milk?"

As soon as he finished speaking all these words, Moses starred at him very hard.

“Or, any nut-based milks, I think,” said the speaker for the people of Israel, “would do the trick.”

Then Moses pointed over to a heap of broken tablets at the foot of the mountain. “Do you remember the Golden Calf?” Moses asked his people. And they did: When Moses had been extremely mad they’d built a golden calf and crushed his first draft of the ten commandments. “Is oat milk another false God?” Moses asked.

“The way freakin’ Justin drinks it, yeah,” said one woman in the crowd, but her words were one amongst the crowd and Moses did not laugh, even though a few people couldn’t hold it in. They laughed. Then the Israelites were silent — except some still were snickering at Justin. And so the snickering was even harder to keep in because of how silent everyone else was.

Moses looked to his brother Aaron and asked: “What has happened since I’ve been up on the mountain?” And Aaron said: “Different kinds of milk have become popular. And though it may seem a luxury a few months ago, pretty much everywhere you go now it’s common: almond milk, cashew milk, and a ton of oat milk. Do not let the anger of my Lord burn hot; you know the people have been in the desert for many months, unsure of the will of their God, and some are lactose intolerant or (at least trying to be) vegan. Other people are doing a cleanse and feel like they have ‘more energy’ without dairy in their diet. I said to them, ‘What energy do you need in paradise? Don’t even ask for the special milks. Just enjoy them now.’ But they did not listen. They’re expecting a lot from paradise. But, I have to say, I see where they’re coming from too. The desert sucks. I’m not trying to get in the middle of anything.”

When Moses heard this, he turned his head away and toward the heavens.

As soon as the Israelites thought Moses couldn’t hear them because he was focused on the Lord, another one whispered to the main speaker: “Also, ask about agave — I don’t really like honey that much.” And the man said back to his fellow Israelite: “Are you kidding me? You ask. I am not doing that.” And a third Israelite said: “All I know is I had to do a burnt offering last week — do you know what that actually is? So fucking gross — not too much to ask for oat milk and agave in paradise. Plus, it’s super weird, imagine a river of milk.” And a fourth Israelite said: “These conditions blow. I still don’t understand why I couldn’t have done this work remote from Egypt — where they do have oat milk.” And a fifth Israelite said: “We need a union.” A few murmured and began to huddle together.

Moses heard all of this, and so did the Lord.

The Lord said to Moses, “Your people, whom you brought up out of the land of Egypt, have acted perversely; they have been quick to turn aside from the way I commanded them; they have put themselves in the image of wealthy people — fancy pants who get special milks and rights; they have worshiped and sacrificed to others. I am a jealous God. Oat milk did not bring them out of Egypt; I did. Plus, it’s not weird, they’re weird. Milk river is a cool idea.” And in his voice, Moses could hear God really was jealous and a bit scared because oat milk didn’t bring them out of Egypt but it was tasty enough that they’d asked for it — and every other time the Israelites had asked Him for things the Lord would send a plague. So, big risk.

Moses said to the people of Israel, “You have sinned!”

And a few people wanted to say it was their cheat day, but they did not.

“Do you want another plague?” Moses continued. A few people wanted to stand up to Moses then but one woman showed all the burnt sores on her leg and whispered: “No more plagues.”

So, it was decided: Moses said the land flowing with milk and honey would not have oat milk. It was paradise with normal milk and normal honey. But the Lord required a sacrifice now because he was mad they didn’t like his idea of a utopia. Moses said of the oat milk: “Bring it to my tent and we will burn it tomorrow to the Lord as a sacrifice.”

On the next day, Moses emerged from his tent with a large belly.

The Lord asked Moses: “Did you drink it?”

Moses said: “No…”

Then the Lord sent another plague.

The woman with burnt sores was angry. And she, also, did not enjoy her coffee that morning.

The great irony of black holes is that, in all the decades that we astrophysicists have talked about them, we never had any direct observational evidence for them. When astronomers said they had “found black holes” in this or that location in a faraway location in the universe, what this really meant was a very compact object—an enormous concentration of mass, far greater than that of any conventional star or planet.

On Wednesday all that changed. The key characteristic of a black hole, what makes it black and a hole, is the existence of an event horizon—a one-way membrane or, if you like, a boundary in spacetime. Because of it, black holes gulp everything but do not allow any matter within, or even light, to escape. The Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) has now precisely offered that evidence in the form of a shadow that the black hole necessarily casts.

Strictly speaking, the system did not see an event horizon, which cannot be seen by definition. Furthermore, although an event horizon necessarily implies a shadow and silhouette, the converse is not true. Nonetheless the observations are still so precise that whatever is casting the shadow must be exotic. No ordinary body could be…
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For an embodiment of the word singlehanded you might turn to the heroine of the recent movie Woman at War. It’s about an Icelandic eco-saboteur who blows up rural power lines and hides in scenic spots from helicopters hunting her and is pretty good with a bow and arrow. But the most famous and effective eco-sabotage in the island’s history was not singlehanded.

In a farming valley on the Laxa River in northern Iceland in August 25, 1970, community members blew up a dam to protect farmland from being flooded. After the dam was dynamited, more than a hundred farmers claimed credit (or responsibility). There were no arrests, and there was no dam, and there were some very positive consequences, including protection of the immediate region and new Icelandic environmental regulations and awareness. It’s almost the only story I know of environmental sabotage having a significant impact, and it may be because it expressed the will of the many, not the few.

We are not very good at telling stories about a hundred people doing things or considering that the qualities that matter in saving a valley or changing the world are mostly not physical courage and violent clashes but the ability to coordinate and inspire and connect with lots of other people and create stories about what could be and how we get there. Back in 1970, the farmers did produce a nice explosion, and movies love explosions almost as much as car chases, but it came at the end of what must have been a lot of meetings, and movies hate meetings.

Halla, the middle-aged protagonist of Woman at War is also a choir director, and being good at getting a group to sing in harmony has more to do with how most environmental battles are actually won than her solo exertions. The movie—which keeps lingering without irony on pictures in her Reykjavik flat of negotiations-and-meetings endurance champions Gandhi and Mandela—doesn’t seem to know it, but it also doesn’t seem to care about how you do this thing that saves rivers or islands or the earth.

Positive social change results mostly from connecting more deeply to the people around you than rising above them, from coordinated rather than solo action. Among the virtues that matter are those traditionally considered feminine rather than masculine, more nerd than jock: listening, respect, patience, negotiation, strategic planning, storytelling. But we like our lone and exceptional heroes, and the drama of violence and virtue of muscle, or at least that’s what we get, over and over, and in the course of getting them we don’t get much of a picture of how change happens and what our role in it might be, or how ordinary people matter. “Unhappy the land that needs heroes” is a line of Bertold Brecht’s I’ve gone to dozens of times, but now I’m more inclined to think, pity the land that thinks it needs a hero, or doesn’t know it has lots and what they look like.

In the wake of Robert Mueller’s long-awaited report, a lot of people reminded us that counting on Mueller to be the St. George who slew our dirtbag dragon was a way of writing off our own obligation and capacity.

Woman at War veers off into another plotline, because after all a woman is at the center, and, conventionally, women who do anything impersonal must be conflicted. Like most movies, it’s more interested in personal stuff, or suggests that we do other stuff for purely personal reasons, so the question of what the hell you do about planetary destruction just sort of fades away. It’s kind of like The Hunger Games, whose author could imagine violently overthrowing an old order—and archer Katniss Everdeen is supremely good at violence—but not creating a new one that’s different, or doing anything political with a larger group that’s not corrupt and hardly worth the bother. Thus, at the drab end of The Hunger Games, Everdeen goes off and has babies with her man in a horribly rugged-individualist Little House on the Prairie nuclear-family in the nuclear-ruins way, or if you prefer, a Voltairian We Must All Tend Our Gardens way if that’s what Voltaire meant at the end of Candide. The archer protagonist of Woman at War also dwindles down to the domestic in the end.

I’m interested in impersonal stuff too, or convinced that this other stuff that’s supposed to be impersonal feeds hearts and souls and is also about love and our deepest needs, because what’s deep is also broad. We need hope and purpose and membership in a community beyond the nuclear family. And this connection is both personally fulfilling and how we get stuff done that needs to be done. Lone hero narratives push one figure into the public eye, but they push everyone else back into private life, or at least passive life.

The legal expert and writer Dahlia Lithwick told me that when she was gearing up to write about the women lawyers who have fought and defeated the Trump Administration in civil rights case after case over the past couple of years, various people insisted she should write a book about Ruth Bader Ginsburg instead. There are already books and films (and t-shirts and coffee mugs galore) about Ginsburg, and these were requests to narrow the focus down to one well-known superstar, when Dahlia in her forthcoming book is trying to broaden it to take in underrecognized constellations of other women lawyers.

Which is to say that the problem of the singlehanded hero exists in nonfiction and news and even history (where it was dubbed the Great Man Theory of History) as much as it does in fiction and film. (There’s also a Terrible Man Theory of History that, for example, in focusing on Trump excuses and ignores the longer history of right-wing destruction and delusion.) To concentrate on Ginsburg is to suggest that one transcendently exceptional individual at the apex of power is who matters. To look at these other lawyers is to suggest that power is dispersed and decisions in various courts across the land matter and so do the lawyers who win them and the people who support them.

This idea that our fate is handed down to us from above is built into so many stories. Even Supreme Court rulings around marriage equality or abortion often reflect shifts in values in the broader society as well as the elections that determine who sits on the court. Those broad shifts are made by the many in acts that often go unrecognized. Even if you only cherish personal life, you have to recognize the public struggles that impact who gets to get married, who gets a living wage and healthcare and education and housing and clean drinking water. Also if you’re one of the 82 people who burned to death in the Paradise fire last year, the consequences of public policy were very personal.

This idea that our fate is handed down to us from above is built into so many stories.

We like heroes and stars and their opposites, though I’m not sure who I mean by we, except maybe the people in charge of too many of our stories, who are themselves often elites who believe devoutly in elites, which is what heroes and stars are often presumed to be. There’s a scorching song by Liz Phair I think about whenever I think about heroes. She sang:

He’s just a hero in a long line of heroes
Looking for something attractive to save
They say he rode in on the back of a pick-up
And he won’t leave town till you remember his name

It’s a caustic revision of the hero as an attention-getter, a party-crasher, a fame-seeker, and at least implicitly a troublemaker in the guise of a problem-solver. And maybe we as a society are getting tired of heroes, and a lot of us are certainly getting tired of overconfident white men. Even the idea that the solution will be singular and dramatic and in the hands of one person erases that the solutions to problems are often complex and many faceted and arrived at via negotiations. The solution to climate change is planting trees but also transitioning (rapidly) away from fossil fuels but also energy efficiency and significant design changes but also a dozen more things about soil and agriculture and transportation and how systems work. There is no solution, but there are are many pieces that add up to a solution, or rather to a modulation of the problem of climate change.

Phair is not the first woman to be caustic about heroes. Ursula K. Le Guin writes,

When she was planning the book that ended up as Three Guineas, Virginia Woolf wrote a heading in her notebook, “Glossary”; she had thought of reinventing English according to a new plan, in order to tell a different story. One of the entries in this glossary is heroism, defined as “botulism.” And hero, in Woolf’s dictionary, is “bottle.” The hero as bottle, a stringent reevaluation. I now propose the bottle as hero.

That’s from Le Guin’s famous 1986 essay “The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction,” which notes that though most of early human food was gathered, and gathering was often women’s work, it’s hunting that made for dramatic stories. And she argues that though the earliest tools have often been thought to be weapons in all their sharp-and-pointy deadliness, containers—thus her bottle joke—were maybe earlier and as or more important, gender/genital implications intended. Hunting is full of singular drama—with my spear I slayed this bear. A group of women gathering grain, on the other hand, doesn’t have a singular gesture or target or much drama. “I said it was hard to make a gripping tale of how we wrested the wild oats from their husks, I didn’t say it was impossible,” says Le Guin toward the end of her essay. Among the Iban people of Borneo, I read recently, the men gained status by headhunting, the women by weaving. Headhunting is more dramatic, but weaving is itself a model for storytelling’s integration of parts and materials into a new whole.

Speaking of women, there’s a new drug for postpartum depression (PPD) about which some experts pointed out that “mothers and advocates alike should consider if the drug is a BandAid on the larger wound of America’s treatment of  mothers. How would PPD rates be affected if we adopted policies that support parents, like subsidized child care, paid parental leave, and health care norms that center mothers’ choices in childbirth and the postpartum period? Pegging the complexities of a new mother’s adjustment as a mental illness ignores cultural factors that cause new parents to feel unsupported.” That is, maybe we need a thousand acts of kindness and connection, rather than deus ex machina drugs to mute the pain of their absence.

That’s another part of our rugged individualism and hero culture, the idea that all problems are personal and they’re all soluble by personal responsibility—or medication that helps you accept what you cannot change, when it can be changed but not by you personally. It’s a framework that eliminates the possibility of deeper, broader change or of holding accountable the powerful who create and benefit from the status quo and its myriad forms of harm. The narrative of individual responsibility and change protects stasis, whether it’s adapting to inequality or poverty or pollution.

Our largest problems won’t be solved by heroes. They’ll be solved, if they are, by movements, coalitions, civil society. The climate movement, for example, has been first of all a mass effort, and if figures like Bill McKibben stand out—well he stands out as the cofounder of a global climate action group whose network is in 188 countries and the guy who keeps saying versions of “The most effective thing you can do about climate as an individual is stop being an individual.” And he’s often spoken of a book that influenced him early on, The Pushcart War, a 1964 children’s tale about pushcart vendors organizing to protect their own in a territorial war against truck drivers on the streets of New York. And, plot spoiler, winning.

I was thinking about all this when I was thinking about Sweden’s Greta Thunberg, a truly remarkable young woman, someone who has catalyzed climate action across the world. But the focus on her may obscure that many remarkable young people before her have stood up and spoken passionately about climate change. Her words mattered because we responded, and we responded in part because the media elevated her as they had not elevated her predecessors, and they elevated her because somehow climate change has been taken more seriously, climate action has acquired momentum, probably due to the actions of tens of thousands or millions who will not be credited with this change. She began alone, but publicly, not secretly, and that made it possible for her actions to be multiplied by more and more others.

The narrative of individual responsibility and change protects stasis, whether it’s adapting to inequality or poverty or pollution.

She’s been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize, which is sometimes awarded to groups and teams, but awards also tend to single out individuals. Some people use their acceptance speech to try to reverse the hero myth and thank all the people who were with them or describe themselves as members of a tribe or an alliance or a movement. Ada Limon, accepting the National Book Critics Circle Award for poetry a few weeks ago, said “We write with all the good ghosts in our corners. I, for one, have never made anything alone, never written a single poem alone” and then listed a lot of people who helped or who mattered or who didn’t get to write poetry.

A general is not much without an army, and social change is not even modeled on generals and armies, because the outstanding figures get others to act willingly, not by command. We would do well to call them catalysts rather than leaders. Martin Luther King was not the Civil Rights Movement and Cesar Chavez was not the farmworker rights movement and to mistake them for that denies the multitudes the recognition they deserve but more importantly denies us strategic understandings when we need them most. Which begins with our own power and ends with how change works.

In the wake of Robert Mueller’s long-awaited report, a lot of people reminded us that counting on Mueller to be the St. George who slew our dirtbag dragon was a way of writing off our own obligation and capacity. Lithwick said it best a month before the investigation wrapped up: “The prevailing ethos seems to be that so long as there is somebody else out there who is capable of Doing Something, the rest of us are free to desist. And for the most part, the person deemed to be Doing Something is Robert Mueller.” Leaders beget followers, and followers are people who’ve surrendered some of their capacities to think and to act. Unfortunate the land whose citizens pass the buck to a hero.

The standard action movie narrative require one exceptional person in the foreground, which requires the rest of the characters to be on the spectrum from useless to clueless to wicked, plus a few moderately helpful auxiliary characters. There are not a lot of movies about magnificent collective action, something I noticed when I wrote about what actually happens in sudden catastrophes—fires, floods, heat waves, freak storms, the kind of calamity that we will see more and more as the age of climate change takes hold. Disaster movies begin with a sudden upset in the order of things—the tower becomes a towering inferno, the meteor heads toward earth, the earth shakes—and then smooths it all over with a kind of father-knows-best here-comes-a-hero plotline of rescuing helpless women and subduing vicious men. Patriarchal authority itself is shown as the solution to disasters, or a sort of drug to make us feel secure despite them.

One of the joys of Liz Phair’s song is that she lets us recognize heroism as a disaster itself. I found out in the research for what became my 2009 book A Paradise Built in Hell, that institutional authorities often behave badly in disasters, in part because they assume that the rest of us will behave badly in the power vacuum disasters bring on and thus they too often turn humanitarian relief into aggressive policing, often in protection of property and the status quo rather than disaster victims. But ordinary people generally behave magnificently, taking care of each other and improvising rescues and the conditions of survival, connecting with each other in ways they might not in everyday life and sometimes finding in that connection something so valuable and meaningful that their stories about who they were and met and what they did shine with joy.

That is, I found in disasters a window onto what so many of us really want and don’t get, a need we hardly name or recognize. There are not a lot of movies that can even imagine this profound emotion I think of as public love, this sense of meaning, purpose, power, belonging to a community, a society, a city, a movement. I’ve talked to survivors of 9/11, Hurricane Katrina, read stories of earlier disasters, blitzes, and found that emotion swimming up through the wreckage and found that people are ravenous for it.

William James said of the 1906 earthquake in San Francisco, “Surely the cutting edge of all our usual misfortunes comes from their character of loneliness.” That is, if I lose my home, I’m cast out among those who remain comfortable, but if we all lose our homes in the earthquake, we’re in this together. One of my favorite sentences from a 1906 survivor is this: “Then when the dynamite explosions were making the night noisy and keeping everybody awake and anxious, the girls or some of the refugees would start playing the piano, and Billy Delaney and other folks would start singing; so that the place became quite homey and sociable, considering it was on the sidewalk, outside the high school, and the town all around it was on fire.”

I don’t know what Billy Delaney or the girls sang, or what stories the oat gatherers Le Guin writes about might have told. But I do have a metaphor, which is itself a kind of carrier bag and metaphor literally means to carry something beyond, carrying being the basic thing language does, language being great nets we weave to hold meaning. Jonathan Jones, an indigenous Wiradjuri/Kamilaroi Australian artist, has an installation—a great infinity-loop figure eight of feathered objects on a curving wall in the Asia-Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art in Brisbane that mimics a murmuration, one of those great flocks of birds in flight that seems to swell and contract and shift as the myriad individual creatures climb and bank and turn together, not crashing into each other, not drifting apart.

From a distance Jones’s objects look like birds; up close they are traditional tools of stick and stone with feathers attached, tools of making taking flight. The feathers were given to him by hundreds who responded to the call he put out, a murmuration of gatherers. “I’m interested in this idea of collective thinking,” he told a journalist. “How the formation of really beautiful patterns and arrangements in the sky can help us potentially start to understand how we exist in this country, how we operate together, how we can all call ourselves Australians. That we all have our own little ideas which can somehow come together to make something bigger.”

What are human murmurations, I wondered? They are, speaking of choruses, in Horton Hears a Who, the tiny Whos of Whoville, who find that if every last one of them raises their voice, they become loud enough to save their home. They are a million and a half young people across the globe on March 15 protesting climate change, coalitions led by Native people holding back fossil fuel pipelines across Canada, the lawyers and others who converged on airports all over the US on January 29, 2017, to protest the Muslim ban.

They are the hundreds who turned out in Victoria, BC, to protect a mosque there during Friday prayers the week after the shooting in Christchurch, New Zealand. My cousin Jessica was one of them, and she wrote about how deeply moving it was for her, “At the end, when prayers were over, and the mosque was emptying onto the street, if felt like a wedding, a celebration of love and joy. We all shook hands and hugged and spoke kindly to each other—Muslim, Jew, Christian, Sikh, Buddhist, atheist…” We don’t have enough art to make us see and prize these human murmurations even when they are all around us, even when they are doing the most important work on earth.

Imagine that an alien species landed on Earth and, through their mere presence, those aliens caused our art to vanish, our music to homogenize, and our technological know-how to disappear. That is effectively what humans have been doing to our closest relatives—chimpanzees.

Back in 1999, a team of scientists led by Andrew Whiten (and including Jane Goodall) showed that chimpanzees from different parts of Africa behave very differently from one another. Some groups use sticks to extract honey, while others use those same tools to fish for ants. Some would get each other’s attention by rapping branches with their knuckles, while others did it by loudly ripping leaves with their teeth. The team identified 39 of these traditions that are practiced by some communities but not others—a pattern that, at the time, hadn’t been seen in any animal except humans. It was evidence, the team said, that chimps have their own cultures.

It took a long time to convince skeptics that such cultures exist, but now we have plenty of examples of animals learning local traditions from one another. Some orangutans blow raspberries at each other before they go to bed. One dolphin learned to tail-walk from captive individuals and spread that trick to its own wild peers once released. Humpbacks and other whales have distinctive calls and songs in different seas. And chimps still stand out with “one of the most impressive cultural repertoires of nonhuman animals,” says Ammie Kalan, of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology.

But just when many scientists have come to accept the existence of animal cultures, many of those cultures might vanish. Kalan and her colleagues have shown, through years of intensive fieldwork, that the very presence of humans has eroded the diversity of chimpanzee behavior. Where we flourish, their cultures shrivel. It is a bitterly ironic thing to learn on the 20th anniversary of Whiten’s classic study.

“It’s amazing to think that just 60 years ago, we knew next to nothing of the behavior of our sister species in the wild,” Whiten says. “But now, just as we are truly getting to know our primate cousins, the actions of humans are closing the window on all we have discovered.”

“Sometimes in the rush to conserve the species, I think we forget about the individuals,” says Cat Hobaiter, a primatologist at the University of St. Andrews. “Each population, each community, even each generation of chimpanzees is unique. An event might only have a small impact on the total population of chimpanzees, but it may wipe out an entire community—an entire culture. No matter what we do to restore habitat or support population growth, we may never be able to restore that culture.”

Since 2010, Kalan has been working on the Pan African Programme, an intensive effort to catalog chimp behavior in 46 sites across the species’ entire range, led by Hjalmar Kühl, Christophe Boesch, and Mimi Arandjelovic. At each site, the team checked whether chimps were carrying out any of 31 different behaviors, including many from Whiten’s original list, and some that had only been recently discovered. “We had things like termite fishing, ant fishing, algae fishing, stone throwing, leaf clipping, using sticks as marrow picks, using caves, bathing, and nut cracking,” Kalan says.

After all this work, the team showed that chimps living in areas most affected by humans were 88 percent less likely to show any one of the 31 behaviors than those living in the most unaffected regions. “However we divided up the data, we got the same very obvious pattern,” Kalan says.

It’s hard to prove a negative, though, and it’s always possible that the chimps were up to their old tricks without the team noticing. But the Pan African Programme team filmed the apes using camera traps, to capture behavior without disturbing the animals. It checked for certain traditions by looking for discarded tools, or checking for specific foods among the apes’ poop. And it scored the chimps generously: Even if it only saw a particular behavior once, it recorded the behavior as being present. If anything, the new results underestimate the extent to which humans suppress chimpanzee cultures.

Such suppression isn’t deliberate. Chimpanzees and other apes learn skills and customs from one another, and those chains of tradition depend on having enough individuals to learn from. So when humans kill chimps for bushmeat, they aren’t just killing individuals—they are also destroying opportunities for the survivors to learn new things. When they fragment the forests in which chimps live, they’re stopping the flow of ideas between populations.

The primatologist Carel van Schaik wrote about these problems in 2002 after studying orangutans, and he predicted then that “major traditional erosion is to be expected in all great apes.” “I realized that testing the hypothesis would be extremely difficult,” van Schaik says, but “thanks to the gargantuan efforts by this team, we have the first data, and they appear to totally confirm the model. It’s a very impressive study.” And it’s worrying, he adds, because many of these cultural behaviors aren’t arbitrary. They’re adaptations, and their loss could push an already endangered species even closer to extinction.

No one knows whether the hemorrhage of chimp culture is getting worse. Few places have tracked chimp behavior over long periods, and those that have are also more likely to have protected their animals from human influence.

And “not all human impacts are the same,” cautions Hobaiter, the University of St. Andrews primatologist. Clearing forests for palm oil is very different from sustainably using a forest as a food source. The Pan African Programme team clumped many indicators of human presence into a single metric, but teasing them apart is important. “Long-term conservation approaches are only going to be effective through the support and leadership of the local communities who live there,” Hobaiter says.

In some cases, the presence of people might create new traditions to replace the ones on the team’s list. In Bossou, Guinea, chimps have started drinking the wine that is fermented on palm trees. In other areas, they’ve taken to raiding human crops. “If you’re getting a lot of energy from high-nutrition human foods, you don’t have to spend half your day breaking nuts,” Kalan says. There’s certainly evidence that chimps can adapt to the presence of humans—but can they innovate quickly enough to compensate for the loss of their old ways?

Even if they can, isn’t that still a tragedy? We care about the loss of our own cultures. We work to document languages that are going extinct. We store old art in museums. We establish heritage sites to protect our cultural and historical treasures. It seems shortsighted—unimaginative, even—to be so concerned with our own traditions, but so blasé about those of our closest cousins, especially when we’ve only just started to appreciate how rich their cultural landscape can be.

Parts of that landscape might be lost before anyone realizes why it exists. In 2016, the Pan African Programme team reported that some West African chimpanzees habitually throw stones against the same trees, creating buildups of rocks that are reminiscent of human cairns. No one knows why they do this. “We’re still investigating it,” Kalan says. “And we might be running out of time.”

Other animals are also likely losing their ancestral knowledge at our hands. When poachers kill an elephant matriarch, they also kill her memories of hidden water sources and anti-lion tactics, leaving her family in a more precarious place. When moose and bighorn sheep were exterminated from parts of the U.S., their generations-old awareness of the best migration routes died with them. Relocated individuals, who were meant to replenish the once-lost populations, didn’t know where to go, and so failed to migrate.

These discoveries mean that conservationists need to think about saving species in a completely new way—by preserving animal traditions as well as bodies and genes. “Instead of focusing only on the conservation of genetically based entities like species, we now need to also consider culturally based entities,” says Whiten, who made a similar argument last week in a paper co-written with many scholars of animal cultures.

Kalan and the Pan African Programme team even think that conservationists should recognize places connected with unique traditions as chimpanzee cultural-heritage sites. “When we come across a nut-cracking site that’s been used for many generations, that site is part of the cultural heritage of this one population of chimps,” Kalan says. The same concept might apply to orangutans, whales, and other cultured creatures.

“What we have learned about culture can also be applied to how we conserve animals,” Whiten adds. When people raised endangered whooping cranes in captivity, they had to show the naive birds how to migrate by hopping into ultralight aircraft and showing them the way. “Where animals are to be reintroduced to areas in which they earlier became extinct, we have to make special efforts to reinstate the cultural knowledge they lost,” Whiten says.

Continually declare, “My allergies are so bad today” so it’s easily heard by everyone working in silence in a 30-foot radius. That way no one will notice your puffy face or badly broken spirit.

Read the wikiHow article with instructions on how to stop crying, take the tips and tricks and ignore how pathetic it makes you feel.

Head to your office’s modern yet impersonal kitchen, grab a couple of handfuls of ice in which to submerge your face. Throw away ice located at the top of the pile in case anyone else touched it.

If you can find a corner full of people who previously slept with coworkers and can no longer face the rest of the department, hide among them.

Take your laptop and set up camp in a bathroom stall, the presence of a door all but puts you on the executive floor.

Realize you’ve been forced to endure coughing fits, hard-boiled eggs, and endless clearly important calls based on their sheer volume and location, inches from your face. Embrace your breakdown.

Cry your eyes out and hurl used tissues at your coworkers since your building is so modern and progressive, there isn’t a single unsightly trash receptacle in sight.

Threaten to throw yourself from the rooftop patio because the removal of walls has barely hidden the hierarchy and ultimately instilled power dynamics, ensuring that those most insecure wield every ounce of leverage available over the lowliest of you.

Wail so the entire floor will have no choice but to hear you, scream so loud that they remove their noise-canceling headphones. Tell them their banal small talk about the weather and Netflix binges has turned them into mannequins, and they’ve lost their humanity.

Stand on your elevating desk, push the “up” button, and slowly rise as you deliver your manifesto — a prophet in an Ann Taylor blouse.

Tell them, through tears of fury as they gaze up at you from their lonely “collaborative” workstations that we are in late-stage capitalism, and this is all a charade with titles to keep the workers in line.

As security approaches, produce the emergency conch shell you keep in your Herschel Supply Co. backpack, inform them, “This is the new law.”

Recruit the accountants first, unassuming perhaps, but they harbor the most violent repressed rage.

Sacrifice an unloved higher-up to get your coworkers on your side, feed his flesh to a ruthless up and comer to set an example, give him a Pamplemousse La Croix to wash it down, no… lime.

Break the office into tribes, strip the people of their titles and their appropriate yet unremarkable work wear. Distribute stamp ink and permanent markers as war paint.

Cut off a coworker’s fingertips with a paper cutter for questioning your methods.

Realize you’ve gone too far, but there’s no turning back. Double down. Claim kitchens and bathrooms as your domain, start a war over resources.

Or, find a tucked away meeting area and work from there for the day.

This article originally appeared on VICE Australia.

A friend recently told me something intriguing over a beer. According to them, I could see a four-meter [13-foot] great white shark floating in a tank of formaldehyde in an abandoned wildlife park, within an hour and a half’s drive. They then gave me the address.

It took me a few weeks to make the journey, but just before I left, a video surfaced on my feed from someone who’d seen it. YouTube promoted the video as “recommended,” and the footage had accrued millions of hits in a matter of days, which had obviously been a disaster for the shark.

In the clip, I could see someone had pried the roof off the shark’s tank, allowing some idiot to throw in a broken television. And a network of cracks had appeared on the tank’s glass where someone had gone at it with a hammer or some other blunt object. To varying degrees, I figure everyone has a killjoy dickhead somewhere inside them, but some hold themselves back better than others. And apparently, the video’s audience size had brought out the fuckwits—as well as some seriously dangerous formaldehyde fumes.

Forewarned and forearmed, my friend and I bought some painfully expensive gas-vapor respirators and some less expensive snacks, and set off.

The shark’s shed was the first thing we found—all of a two-minute walk from the property gate. We pulled open the roller door and there it was: a huge dark tank, surrounded by clutter. Since the tank had been damaged, its formaldehyde solution had turned a murky green so it was initially hard to make out the shark. But we let our eyes adjust and its shape emerged, silhouetted by light pouring through a hole in the roof. The animal was large and strange and perfectly complimented by the sound of rustling wind. A tag on the wall read “mysterious shark.”

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Melbourne’s shark was never intended to become art. Initially caught in 1998 off the South Australian coast, the great white was originally preserved for display at a Victorian ecotourism center devoted to fur seals. Given that fur seals make up a significant portion of a great white’s diet, you can see the synergy.

Things fell apart in the early 2000s when the center committed to expanding its underwater display failed to follow through on its deal with the state government, leaving the shark and its tank without a suitable home. Its then-owner temporarily rehoused the shark in a small wildlife park that was devoted to the preservation of the Giant Gippsland Earthworm.

What happened next was that the earthworm park was sold in 2003, along with the shark, which was supposed to be only “temporarily” rehoused. The shark’s original owner suggested that it should be donated to the Melbourne Museum, but as it was now the legal property of the earthworm park’s new management, that failed to eventuate.

Jump forward a few years, and the state government expanded the park’s adjacent highway, and so the shark’s home went into rapid decline. A series of owners and operators displayed varying levels of enthusiasm for the site’s maintenance or paperwork, which culminated in the closure of the entire venue for displaying wildlife without a permit in 2012.

Curiously, the shark—alongside the rest of the park’s non-living attractions—were left behind. Apparently, interest from the curators at the Melbourne Museum also cooled, as the shark began to deteriorate in its forgotten tank. So then, for the next seven years, unless you were intimately connected to Melbourne’s urban exploration scene, you’d have never known that a discount Damien Hirst was sitting unseen within an easy drive of Melbourne’s city center.

Now, in a brief few months, I guess that’s changed, with the previously undisturbed shark now becoming internet-famous. That said, given that a series of vandals have been doing increasingly irreparable damage almost every week, it’s only a matter of time before this curious specimen slips wholly out of existence.

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Native to central and southern Europe, the amphibious alpine newt breeds in shallow water, where its larvae are born, hatch and feed on plankton, before sprouting legs and moving to land. This timelapse video from the Dutch director Jan van IJken tracks the development of a single-celled zygote into the hatched larva of an alpine newt. Captured in stunning detail at microscopic scales, Becoming is a remarkable look at the process of cell division and differentiation, whence all animals – from newts to humans – come. For more awe-inspiring biology from van IJken, watch The Art of Flying.

By Aeon Video

Watch at Aeon

In 2017, the Aussie psych-rock mob King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard pulled off something incredible. At the beginning of the year, they promised that they'd release five new albums before the year was over. And then they did it. And all the albums were worth hearing. (For my money, the best of them was … More »

Ariana Grande fucked up. The pop star just got a tattoo to celebrate her new #1 single "7 Rings." The tattoo, which she revealed on Instagram last night, is on the palm of her hand. It's supposed to say "7 Rings" in Japanese kanji. Unfortunately, it doesn't quite succeed. More »

On Friday afternoon, President Donald Trump walked into the Rose Garden to announce, effectively, that he was throwing in the towel. After shutting down the government as part of a 35-day executive tantrum to secure funding for his proposed border wall with Mexico, Trump announced a plan to reopen the government for the next three weeks while House and Senate negotiators look at border-security funding measures. The government will reopen, and no wall is in sight.

It was the coda to what has been a national misery and a rolling disaster for the self-designated deal maker: By Friday afternoon, Trump’s disapproval rating had shot up five points since the start of the federal freeze, and one in five Americans polled said that the shutdown had personally inconvenienced them. This sure didn’t seem like big-shot master strategy.

The Rose Garden capitulation, besides providing the capstone to Trump’s public disgrace, was an undeniable victory for Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, and a lesson about the new Washington power dynamic: The Donald has met his match.

[Read: The shutdown deal is the same one Trump previously rejected]

From her very first shutdown scrap with Trump in the Oval Office in mid-December, shortly before the federal drama officially began, the speaker was clearly not going to be politely deferential to the whims and wisecracks of the president. Within moments of being offered the chance to speak with the press during a televised gaggle, Pelosi had edged Trump off his footing:

“We should not have a Trump shutdown …”  Pelosi said.

“A what? Did you say ‘Trump’?” he replied.

Indeed, she had said “Trump shutdown,” and by the conclusion of their unfortunately televised conclave, Trump had been fully lured into the bear trap: “I’ll tell you what, I am proud to shut down the government for border security … I will take the mantle. I will be the one to shut it down. I’m not going to blame you for it. The last time you shut it down, it didn’t work. I will take the mantle of shutting down, and I’m going to shut it down for border security.”

Trump, and his advisers, have known ever since that it would be impossible to blame Democrats for the shutdown, and the American public has not forgotten, either. (A majority blame Trump and Republicans.) Trump would never really recover from it.

[Read: The longest shutdown in history reaches a breaking point]

As things got progressively worse, as more unpaid federal workers lined up for canned food and more security agencies made public the ways in which the shutdown was compromising their basic capability to operate, Trump’s inability to land a punch—to even swing!—became embarrassingly apparent.

After a series of letters litigating whether (or not) the president would be allowed to deliver a State of the Union address next week, Pelosi this Wednesday informed Trump that no, the House was closed.

In response, the president … caved.

Late that night, he tweeted:

As the Shutdown was going on, Nancy Pelosi asked me to give the State of the Union Address. I agreed. She then changed her mind because of the Shutdown, suggesting a later date. This is her prerogative--I will do the Address when the Shutdown is over…

“Nancy’s Prerogative” might be the name of an Irish bar, but in this case it signaled the waving of the presidential white flag, a fairly shocking thing to see on any war front. Trump’s pugilistic impulses, after all, have been virtually unchecked—especially these days, when he is without administration minders. But Pelosi has rendered Trump unable to employ his traditional weaponry. He couldn’t even muster the juju necessary to formulate that most Trumpian of Trump battle strategies, a demeaning nickname. “Nancy Pelosi, or Nancy, as I call her,” Trump said on Wednesday, “doesn’t want to hear the truth.”

[Peter Beinart: Democrats are blowing a golden opportunity]

Nancy—also known as “Nancy.” This was not just the basement of creative nomenclature; it signaled something else: defeat. Some sort of mystical Pelosian shield rendered the disrespecter in chief unable to skewer her. In reality, that shield is probably power. Here is what the former Trump Organization executive Barbara Res told The New York Times about Pelosi:

[She represents] a new challenge to Mr. Trump’s lifelong tactics. One blind spot [Res] observed was that Mr. Trump “believes he’s better than anyone who ever lived” and saw even the most capable of women as easy to run over. “But there was never a woman with power that he ran up against, until Pelosi,” she said. “And he doesn’t know what to do with it. He’s totally in a corner.”

Trump has intersected with powerful women before—Hillary Clinton, most notably—and showed little hesitation to diminish and demean. But Pelosi, who once joked to me she eats nails for breakfast, is a ready warrior. She is happy to meet the demands of war, whereas Clinton was reluctant, semi-disgusted, and annoyed to be dragged to the depths that running against Trump demanded. The speaker of the House is, technically, a coastal elite from San Francisco, but she was trained in the hurly-burly of machine politics of Baltimore by her father, Mayor Thomas D’Alesandro Jr. It is not a coincidence that Pelosi has managed, over and over, to vanquish her rivals in the challenges for Democratic leadership: she flocks to the fight, not just because she usually wins, but apparently because she likes it.

To be powerful and to also need nothing is to be in the catbird seat, and Pelosi, in this moment, had both: her House majority is on offense, and the shutdown was—and now forevermore will be—Trump’s humiliation. If we can give credit to the president in this moment of failure, perhaps it is in the fact that he likely recognized, before even the first federal worker was furloughed, that Pelosi had already won.

Hannah Aizenman reflects on the poetry of Mary Oliver, who died on Thursday, that was published in The New Yorker.

At first glance, the hagfish—a sinuous, tubular animal with pink-grey skin and a paddle-shaped tail—looks very much like an eel. Naturalists can tell the two apart because hagfish, unlike other fish, lack backbones (and, also, jaws). For everyone else, there’s an even easier method. “Look at the hand holding the fish,” the marine biologist Andrew Thaler once noted. “Is it completely covered in slime? Then, it’s a hagfish.”

Hagfish produce slime the way humans produce opinions—readily, swiftly, defensively, and prodigiously. They slime when attacked or simply when stressed. On July 14, 2017, a truck full of hagfish overturned on an Oregon highway. The animals were destined for South Korea, where they are eaten as a delicacy, but instead, they were strewn across a stretch of Highway 101, covering the road (and at least one unfortunate car) in slime.

Typically, a hagfish will release less than a teaspoon of gunk from the 100 or so slime glands that line its flanks. And in less than half a second, that little amount will expand by 10,000 times—enough to fill a sizable bucket. Reach in, and every move of your hand will drag the water with it. “It doesn’t feel like much at first, as if a spider has built a web underwater,” says Douglas Fudge of Chapman University. But try to lift your hand out, and it’s as if the bucket’s contents are now attached to you.

The slime looks revolting, but it’s also one of nature’s more wondrous substances, unlike anything else that’s been concocted by either evolution or engineers. Fudge, who has been studying its properties for two decades, says that when people first touch it, they are invariably surprised. “It looks like a bunch of mucus that someone just sneezed out of their nose,” he says. “That’s not at all what it’s like.”

For a start, it’s not sticky. If there wasn’t so damn much of it, you’d be able to wipe it off your skin with ease. The hagfish themselves scrape the slime off their skin by tying a knot in their bodies and sliding it from head to tail.

The slime also “has a very strange sensation of not quite being there,” says Fudge. It consists of two main components—mucus and protein threads. The threads spread out and entangle one another, creating a fast-expanding net that traps both mucus and water. Astonishingly, to create a liter of slime, a hagfish has to release only 40 milligrams of mucus and protein—1,000 times less dry material than human saliva contains. That’s why the slime, though strong and elastic enough to coat a hand, feels so incorporeal.

Read: [Why are there so many more species on land when the sea is bigger]?

Indeed, it’s one of the softest materials ever measured. “Jell-O is between 10,000 and 100,000 times stiffer than hagfish slime,” says Randy Ewoldt from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, who had to invent new methods for assessing the substance’s properties after conventional instruments failed to cope with its nature. “When you see it in a bucket, it almost still looks like water. Only when you stick your hand in and pick it up do you find that it’s a coherent thing.”

The proteins threads that give the slime cohesion are incredible in their own right. Each is one-100th the width of a human hair, but can stretch for four to six inches. And within the slime glands, each thread is coiled like a ball of yarn within its own tiny cell—a feat akin to stuffing a kilometer of Christmas lights into a shoebox without a single knot or tangle. No one knows how the hagfish achieves this miracle of packaging, but Fudge just got a grant to test one idea. He thinks that the thread cells use their nuclei—the DNA-containing structures at their core—like a spindle, turning them to wind the growing protein threads into a single continuous loop.

Once these cells are expelled from the slime glands, they rupture, releasing the threads within them. Ewoldt’s colleague Gaurav Chaudhury found that despite their length, the threads can fully unspool in a fraction of a second. The pull of flowing water is enough to unwind them. But the process is even quicker if the loose end snags on a surface, like another thread, or a predator’s mouth.  

Being extremely soft, the slime is very good at filling crevices, and scientists had long assumed that hagfish use it to clog the gills of would-be predators. That hypothesis was only confirmed in 2011, when Vincent Zintzen from the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa finally captured footage of hagfish sliming conger eels, wreckfish, and more. Even a shark was forced to retreat, visibly gagging on the cloud of slime in its jaws.

“We were blown away by those videos,” Fudge says, “but when we really looked carefully, we noticed that the slime is released after the hagfish is bitten.” So how does the animal survive that initial attack? His colleague Sarah Boggett showed that the answer lies in their skin. It’s exceptionally loose, and attaches to the rest of the body at only a few places. It’s also very flaccid: You could inject a hagfish with an extra 40 percent of its body volume without stretching the skin. The animal is effectively wearing a set of extremely loose pajamas, Fudge says. If a shark bites down, “the body sort of squishes out of the way.”

Read: [Mysterious ocean blobs aren’t so mysterious]

That ability makes hagfish not only hard to bite, but also hard to defend against. Calli Freedman, another member of Fudge’s team, showed that these animals can wriggle through slits less than half the width of their bodies. In the wild, they use that ability to great effect. They can hunt live fish by pulling them out of sandy burrows. And if disturbed by predators, they can dive into the nearest nook they find. Perhaps that’s why, in 2013, the Italian researcher Daniela Silvia Pace spotted a bottlenose dolphin with a hagfish stuck in its blowhole.

More commonly, these creatures burrow into dead or dying animals, in search of flesh to scavenge. They can’t bite; instead, they rasp away at carcasses with a plate of toothy cartilage in their mouths. The same traveling knots they use to de-slime themselves also help them eat. They grab into a cadaver, then move a knot from tail to head, using the leverage to yank out mouthfuls of meat. They can also eat by simply sitting inside a corpse, and absorbing nutrients directly through their skin and gills. The entire hagfish is effectively a large gut, and even that is understating matters: Their skin is actually more efficient at absorbing nutrients than their own intestines.

Hagfish are so thoroughly odd that biologists have struggled to clearly work out how they’re related to other fish, and to the other backboned vertebrates. Based on their simple anatomy, many researchers billed the creatures as primitive precursors to vertebrates—an intermediate form that existed before the evolution of jaws and spinal columns.

But a new fossil called Tethymyxine complicates that story. Hailing from a Lebanese quarry, and purchased by researchers at a fossil show in Tucson, Arizona, the Cretaceous-age creature is clearly a hagfish. It has a raspy cartilage plate in its mouth, slime glands dotting its flanks, and even chemicals within those glands that match the composition of modern slime. By comparing Tethymyxine to other hagfish, Tetsuto Miyashita from the University of Chicago concluded that these creatures (along with another group of jawless fish, the lampreys) are not precursors to vertebrates, but actual vertebrates themselves.

Such work is always contentious, but it fits with the results of genetic studies. If it’s right, then hagfish aren’t primitive evolutionary throwbacks at all. Instead, they represent a lineage of vertebrates that diverged from all the others about 550 million years ago, and lost several traits such as complex eyes, taste buds, scales, and perhaps even bones. Maybe those losses were adaptations to a life spent infiltrating carcasses in the dark, deep ocean, much like their flaccid, nutrient-absorbing skins are. “Hagfishes might look primitive; they’re actually very specialized,” Miyashita adds.

Their signature slime might have also evolved as a result of that lifestyle, as a way of fending off predators that were competing for cadavers. “Everything about hagfish is weird,” says Fudge, “but it all kind of fits.”  

Many historians agree that the North American figure of Santa Claus can be traced back to a monk named Saint Nicholas of Myra, a bearded fourth-century Greek Christian with a penchant for charitable giving. St. Nicholas was presumably the basis for the Dutch Sinterklaas, patron saint of children, who donned a big, red cape and rode around on a white horse to visit children on the name day of Saint Nicholas, the sixth of December. According to folklore, Sinterklaas carried a red book in which he recorded a child’s behavior over the past year as having been good or naughty. Sinterklaas is said to have been slowly transformed into modern-day Santa by 1700s Dutch immigrants in the New World.

“But maybe there’s another story worth telling this season—one about a psychedelic mushroom-eating shaman from the Arctic.” That’s Matthew Salton, whose animated short film, Santa Is a Psychedelic Mushroom, presents a different origin story entirely. It’s a compelling narrative, backed by Harvard professors, anthropologists, and esteemed mycologists alike, and it bears an uncanny semblance to the modern tradition of Santa Claus.

Until just a few hundred years ago, the story goes, the indigenous Sami people of Lapland, a wintry region in northern Finland dense with conifer forests, would wait in their houses on the Winter Solstice to be visited by shamans. These shamans would perform healing rituals using the hallucinogenic mushroom Amanita muscaria, a red-and-white toadstool fungus that they considered holy. So holy, in fact, that the shamans dressed up like the mushrooms for their visit. Wearing large red-and-white suits, the shamans would arrive at the front doors of houses and attempt to enter; however, many families were snowed in, and the healers were forced to drop down the chimney. They would act as conduits between the spirit and human world, bringing gifts of introspection that could solve the family’s problems. Upon arrival, the healers were regaled with food. They would leave as they came: on reindeer-drawn sleds.

In Salton’s film, the animation is hand drawn; each illustration is traced over at least three times, “depending on how the image moves or morphs from one thing to the next,” Salton told The Atlantic.

Although Salton himself harbors a healthy skepticism about the shamanistic origins of Santa, he believes the inquiry has its own merit. “In my opinion, the connections can’t all be 100 percent true, but they’re surprising and fun to think about,” he said. “My understanding is that most academics who approach the subject do so as a fun exercise and not something to be taken too seriously. That said, I think many would agree it’s important to question and take a deeper look into our shared folklore. Santa consists of an amalgamation of many ideas, traditions, and imagery. My film focuses on just one aspect.”

The animation features interviews with experts on the subject, such as Lawrence Millman, a writer and mycologist who is admittedly not one for holiday cheer. “I hate Christmas,” Millman says in the film. “The shaman comes as a healer or to give advice … we should think in terms of regarding Christmas not as a capitalistic holiday, but a time to think more spiritually about life.”

A peacock’s tail is so ostentatious that you could easily miss other parts of its anatomy that, on any other bird, would be unmissable. On the heads of both male and female peafowl, there’s a crest of stiff, spatula-like feathers that resemble the helmet of a Roman centurion. It’s a flamboyant, standout trait that, under the circumstances, is just another decoration among many equally eye-catching ones.

But Suzanne Amador Kane, a physicist from Haverford College, has found that the crest is much more than a mere adornment. It’s also a sensor. Its feathers are tuned to vibrate at the exact same frequencies at which a displaying peacock rattles his tail. When a male shows off his trademark fan, the female he’s courting doesn’t just see him. She also feels him, in her head.

When Kane’s collaborator Roslyn Dakin first studied peafowl crests in 2011, she thought they might act as a signal. By looking at their length, thickness, or color, other peafowl could potentially judge the health or attractiveness of potential mates. But when Dakin analyzed the crests, she found that they’re not varied enough to be a reliable signal. “We couldn’t figure out a function for them,” says Kane.

Then they heard about the auklets.

Auklets are bizarre, puffin-like seabirds that nest in huge colonies, sound like trumpets, and smell like tangerines. Their heads are topped with striking, forward-facing ponytails that scientists had long seen as sexual ornaments: The bigger the crest, the sexier the auklet. But in 2010, Sampath Seneviratne and Ian Jones showed that the crests also act like a rat’s whiskers. The auklets use them to sense the walls of the rocky crevices in which they nest; when Seneviratne and Jones taped down these feathers, the birds were more likely to bonk their heads.

After Kane read about this discovery, “the next time I looked at peafowl crests, I saw them very differently,” she says. Peafowl don’t live in rocky crevices, so their crests are clearly not collision detectors. But perhaps, Kane reasoned, they could be vibration­ detectors. When male peacocks fan out their tails, they also shake them at high speeds—about 26 times a second. This creates a stunning visual illusion in which their eyespots seem to hover against a shimmering background. It also creates a rattling noise, and a wave of pressure that could conceivably vibrate the crest of a watching female.

[Read: Crows sometimes have sex with their dead]

To test this idea, Kane and her colleague Daniel Van Beveren acquired several peafowl crests from online vendors and zoos. “A lot of the specimens I got in very strange ways,” says Kane. “One bird was a zoo peacock that had the bad luck to fly into the polar-bear enclosure.”

On closer inspection, the team found that the crest has the right equipment to act as a sensor. At the base of each plume, there’s a tiny companion feather called a filoplume. These are also found in other birds, and they’re known to be mechanical sensors: Something shakes the big feather, the big feather nudges the filoplume, and the filoplume triggers a nerve cell.

Next, the team mounted the crests on mechanical shakers and showed that the constituent feathers resonate when shaken 26 times a second—the exact frequency at which displaying peacocks shake their tail feathers. Only the crest feathers behave like this; when the team tested feathers from other peafowl body parts, or from other big-crested birds, none of them resonated at that precise frequency.

Kane was astonished. “Something the length of a peacock tail feather should have a much different resonant frequency to these tiny crest feathers,” she says. “It’s as if you had a bass that sounded like a violin. It just can’t be a coincidence.”

As a final test of the sensor hypothesis, the team used speakers to play various noises at the crest feathers. White noise did nothing. Pop songs, such as “Staying Alive” by the Bee Gees, had little effect. But a recording of an actual peacock’s tail-rattle made them vibrate.

“The study is rigorous,” says Gail Patricelli, an evolutionary biologist from the University of California at Davis, but “there is still a great deal we don’t know.” For example, “given that peafowl have ears that can hear across a wide range of frequencies, what’s the advantage of having this extra low-frequency channel for communication? Perhaps males and females use it as a private channel that doesn’t attract the attention of predators.”

If that’s the case, “what are they saying to each other?” Patricelli adds. “I’m big and healthy? I’m sexy? Or both? I’m imagining that males who are able to cause the feathers on a female’s head to literally vibrate may have had a significant advantage in sexiness!”

And don’t forget the peahens, says Kane. “There’s a long-standing idea males are the ones who are communicating, but if you actually observe them, the females frequently do these displays to each other, to the males, and to their young,” she says. “They could be taking part in the mating displays. Or issuing threats. Or encouraging the young to do mating displays.”

[Read: This hummingbird’s tail whistles, and no one’s sure why]

To better understand the significance of these vibrations, Kane wants to film the crests of living peafowl to see if they actually shake in response to each other’s displays. That’s easier said than done, since both the displaying bird and the watching one move around a lot during courtship. To begin, the team might blindfold peafowl to see whether they react to waves of air that mimic a rattling tail. They could also change the crest’s resonant frequency by stiffening it with varnish, then see whether a peafowl reacts differently to a tail display.

Kane also wants to study other birds, whose larger crests might be easier for a camera to follow. At least 35 candidate species have flexible crests and some kind of shaking display. These include the secretary bird (a “ninja eagle on stilts”), the Victoria crowned pigeon (a giant blue dove with a feather-duster head), the Himalayan monal (an acid-trip pheasant), and the hoatzin (a prehistoric-looking punk rocker that smells of cow dung). Perhaps these species, though already dramatic and eye-catching, are also walking around with secret sense organs, hidden in plain sight.

MIT researchers have invented a way to fabricate nanoscale 3-D objects of nearly any shape. They can also pattern the objects with a variety of useful materials, including metals, quantum dots, and DNA.

“It’s a way of putting nearly any kind of material into a 3-D pattern with nanoscale precision,” says Edward Boyden, the Y. Eva Tan Professor in Neurotechnology and an associate professor of biological engineering and of brain and cognitive sciences at MIT.

Using the new technique, the researchers can create any shape and structure they want by patterning a polymer scaffold with a laser. After attaching other useful materials to the scaffold, they shrink it, generating structures one thousandth the volume of the original.

These tiny structures could have applications in many fields, from optics to medicine to robotics, the researchers say. The technique uses equipment that many biology and materials science labs already have, making it widely accessible for researchers who want to try it.

Boyden, who is also a member of MIT’s Media Lab, McGovern Institute for Brain Research, and Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research, is one of the senior authors of the paper, which appears in the Dec. 13 issue of Science. The other senior author is Adam Marblestone, a Media Lab research affiliate, and the paper’s lead authors are graduate students Daniel Oran and Samuel Rodriques.

Implosion fabrication

Existing techniques for creating nanostructures are limited in what they can accomplish. Etching patterns onto a surface with light can produce 2-D nanostructures but doesn’t work for 3-D structures. It is possible to make 3-D nanostructures by gradually adding layers on top of each other, but this process is slow and challenging. And, while methods exist that can directly 3-D print nanoscale objects, they are restricted to specialized materials like polymers and plastics, which lack the functional properties necessary for many applications. Furthermore, they can only generate self-supporting structures. (The technique can yield a solid pyramid, for example, but not a linked chain or a hollow sphere.)

To overcome these limitations, Boyden and his students decided to adapt a technique that his lab developed a few years ago for high-resolution imaging of brain tissue. This technique, known as expansion microscopy, involves embedding tissue into a hydrogel and then expanding it, allowing for high resolution imaging with a regular microscope. Hundreds of research groups in biology and medicine are now using expansion microscopy, since it enables 3-D visualization of cells and tissues with ordinary hardware.

By reversing this process, the researchers found that they could create large-scale objects embedded in expanded hydrogels and then shrink them to the nanoscale, an approach that they call “implosion fabrication.”

As they did for expansion microscopy, the researchers used a very absorbent material made of polyacrylate, commonly found in diapers, as the scaffold for their nanofabrication process. The scaffold is bathed in a solution that contains molecules of fluorescein, which attach to the scaffold when they are activated by laser light.

Using two-photon microscopy, which allows for precise targeting of points deep within a structure, the researchers attach fluorescein molecules to specific locations within the gel. The fluorescein molecules act as anchors that can bind to other types of molecules that the researchers add.

“You attach the anchors where you want with light, and later you can attach whatever you want to the anchors,” Boyden says. “It could be a quantum dot, it could be a piece of DNA, it could be a gold nanoparticle.”

“It’s a bit like film photography — a latent image is formed by exposing a sensitive material in a gel to light. Then, you can develop that latent image into a real image by attaching another material, silver, afterwards. In this way implosion fabrication can create all sorts of structures, including gradients, unconnected structures, and multimaterial patterns,” Oran says.

Once the desired molecules are attached in the right locations, the researchers shrink the entire structure by adding an acid. The acid blocks the negative charges in the polyacrylate gel so that they no longer repel each other, causing the gel to contract. Using this technique, the researchers can shrink the objects 10-fold in each dimension (for an overall 1,000-fold reduction in volume). This ability to shrink not only allows for increased resolution, but also makes it possible to assemble materials in a low-density scaffold. This enables easy access for modification, and later the material becomes a dense solid when it is shrunk.

“People have been trying to invent better equipment to make smaller nanomaterials for years, but we realized that if you just use existing systems and embed your materials in this gel, you can shrink them down to the nanoscale, without distorting the patterns,” Rodriques says.

Currently, the researchers can create objects that are around 1 cubic millimeter, patterned with a resolution of 50 nanometers. There is a tradeoff between size and resolution: If the researchers want to make larger objects, about 1 cubic centimeter, they can achieve a resolution of about 500 nanometers. However, that resolution could be improved with further refinement of the process, the researchers say.

Better optics

The MIT team is now exploring potential applications for this technology, and they anticipate that some of the earliest applications might be in optics — for example, making specialized lenses that could be used to study the fundamental properties of light. This technique might also allow for the fabrication of smaller, better lenses for applications such as cell phone cameras, microscopes, or endoscopes, the researchers say. Farther in the future, the researchers say that this approach could be used to build nanoscale electronics or robots.

“There are all kinds of things you can do with this,” Boyden says. “Democratizing nanofabrication could open up frontiers we can’t yet imagine.”

Many research labs are already stocked with the equipment required for this kind of fabrication. “With a laser you can already find in many biology labs, you can scan a pattern, then deposit metals, semiconductors, or DNA, and then shrink it down,” Boyden says.

The research was funded by the Kavli Dream Team Program, the HHMI-Simons Faculty Scholars Program, the Open Philanthropy Project, John Doerr, the Office of Naval Research, the National Institutes of Health, the New York Stem Cell Foundation-Robertson Award, the U.S. Army Research Office, K. Lisa Yang and Y. Eva Tan, and the MIT Media Lab.

Radiohead frontman Thom Yorke is amidst a solo tour of the United States. Following last night’s concert in Denver, Yorke spent at least a portion of the evening Googling GIFs from the children’s movie franchise Paddington, one of which he posted to his Twitter account a little before 3:00 a.m.

I have so many questions: as the bathtub scene is from the first Paddington, is he suggesting that film is better than Paddington 2, in which case what the fuck? Might he be scoring Paddington 3 as his follow-up to Suspiria? Does he prefer baths over showers?

But, perhaps, most importantly, how does this tie into Radiohead’s next album?

The Hawaiian Monk Seal Research Program released a photo on Facebook a few days ago of a monk seal with an eel up its nose.

You’ve heard of Elf on a Shelf… Now get ready for:

I think he’s trying to tell the photographer “hey, put the camera down and help me, jerk.”

Accompanying the photo was this caption:

Mondays…it might not have been a good one for you but it had to have been better than an eel in your nose. We have reported on this phenomenon before which was first noted a few years back. We have now found juvenile seals with eels stuck in their noses on multiple occasions. In all cases the eel was successfully removed and the seals were fine. The eels, however, did not make it.

So what’s going on here?

Nobody really knows.

“It’s just so shocking,” Claire Simeone, a veterinarian and monk seal expert based in Hawaii, told The Washington Post on Thursday. “It’s an animal that has another animal stuck up its nose.”

There have been a few other reported instances of seals with eels in their noses, leading scientist Charles Littnan asking the seals to “make better choices” with their lives.

The Washington Post continued:

It all began about two years ago when Littnan, the lead scientist of the monk seal program, woke up to a strange email from researchers in the field. The subject line was short: “Eel in nose.”

“It was just like, ‘We found a seal with an eel stuck in its nose. Do we have a protocol?’ ” Littnan told The Post in a phone interview.

There was none, Littnan said, and it took several emails and phone calls before the decision was made to grab the eel and try pulling it out.

“There was only maybe two inches of the eel actually still sticking out of the nose, so it was very much akin to the magician’s trick when they’re pulling out the handkerchiefs and they keep coming and coming and coming,” he said.

After less than a minute of tugging, a two-and-a-half-foot dead eel emerged from the seal’s nostril.

For a limited time, get FREE SHIPPING on our ‘Animals of the world’ shirt, available exclusively in our store!

Littnan also told the Post that he has no idea why this is happening.

“We have no idea why this is suddenly happening,” Littnan said. “You see some very strange things if you watch nature long enough, and this could end up being one of these little oddities and mysteries of our careers that 40 years from now, we’ll be retired and still questioning quite how this happened.”

A seal’s diet typically consists of fish, octopuses, and eels, but generally they swallow their food like a normal mammal instead of trying to snort it.

Littnan also said that “They like to stick their faces into the coral reef holes, and they’ll spit water out of their mouths to flush things out. And they’ll do all sorts of tricks, but they are shoving their faces into holes.” It’s possible that the eels, who are cornered, think their best course of action is to swim up the eel’s nose. No teeth in the nose, I guess? 

No seals are known to have been seriously injured by having eels up their noses, however sealin’ around doing important seal business with a dead animal in your nose is probably not a great idea.

Littnan told the Post that if seals could understand human people, “I would gently plead for them to stop.”

The Hawaiian monk seal is one of the rarest species of seals in the world, and is classified as endangered in the United States. The National Wildlife Foundation estimates that there are only about 1100 monk seals left in the wild, and that number is decreasing at a rate of about 4% each year. One of the causes of their decline is tiger sharks feeding on them, but the main culprit is humans. This comes in the form of entanglement in fishing gear, acidification, and of course… climate change.

Cover image: Hawaiian Monk Seal Research Program via Facebook

The post Hawaiian monk seals are snorting eels and nobody nose why appeared first on A Science Enthusiast.

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