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Arts

- What We Misunderstand About Robots

ARTS | VIEW ON WEBSITE

What We Misunderstand About Robots

Sci-fi master Adrian Tchaikovsky on evolution, other minds, and the politics of science

By Brandon Keim    June 20, 2025

A malfunctioning robot butler in search of a purpose. Spiders infected by a virus that accelerated their cognitive evolution. A dissident ecologist exiled to another planet for challenging the idea that humanity is the apex of evolution.

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These are just a few of the characters to spring from the ever-fizzing mind of science-fiction maestro Adrian Tchaikovsky, whose novels combine an endless delight in science with a sharp awareness of how that science is shaped—for better and for worse—by economic and political power.

That combination made Tchaikovsky, winner of the prestigious Hugo and Arthur C. Clarke awards, one of his genre’s most relevant, of-the-moment voices. Given Tchaikovsky’s background, though, his success is itself a plot twist.

Raised on David Attenborough specials and visits to London’s Natural History Museum, a young Tchaikovsky was fascinated by evolution and the mind’s workings, but his university studies in psychology and zoology soon left him disillusioned. “I wanted to learn how people think,” he says. “What I got was 400 different statistical tests.” As for insects, a subject of particular devotion, they merited but one lecture in his zoology course—“and it was about how people kill them.”

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“I can appreciate that people want science as it relates to them, but I want to learn about insects,” he continues. “I want to talk about things that are very different than us. And we are still very prey to that old Victorian idea of a ladder of progress with people at the top.”

Nautilus talked to Tchaikovsky—whose new book, Bee Speaker, is set in a future where genetically engineered, super-intelligent honeybee swarms help humanity rebuild their war-ravaged, climate-changed society—about his fascinations.

A VORACIOUS MIND: Adrian Tchaikovsky wasn’t much of a science student—but he became one of the most celebrated science fiction authors of our time. Photo by Tom Pepperdine.

Many of your books feature scientists rebelling against authoritarian governments or trying to survive in authoritarian times. Do you think there is something intrinsically anti-authoritarian about science?

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While I am a rationalist and very pro-science, I am well aware that there have been periods of time when science has been entirely co-opted for malign purposes.

But speaking of a Platonically ideal science: The point of science is that truth matters. Science is an attempt to find the truth about the universe by empirical methods. It is a unique belief system in that it is not based on faith; while people often attempt to equate it with other belief systems, such as religious ones, it is unique in that it should be interested in a truth that is testable and findable, rather than one that you set ahead of time and try to make everything fit. Authoritarian governments do not look for truth. If you’re running an authoritarian system then you have a set of predisposed beliefs that everything has to fit, just as if you were running a theocracy. So science, if it is being conducted honestly, is going to come into conflict with authoritarianism.

In your writing, I’ve found a simultaneous delight in technology and wariness of how it could go wrong. What do you think is a healthy relationship to technology?

Technology is where the application of science moves into wider society. My own attitude toward technology has shifted because of the rise of the “tech bros” and their global dominance and this aggravating debasing of technology. Most of what people describe as AI are not AI. Actual AI research is probably being set back by 10 or 20 years—partly because people will get very disillusioned with it, and anything described as AI will get kicked to the curb, and partly because the funding that would go to valid projects is going to that sort of nonsense.

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The point of science is that truth matters.

Given the plot of your novel Service Model, I expected you to say something about the dangers of overreliance on technology.

Service Model is set up to look like an overreliance-on-technology scenario. Hopefully, though, the message at the end is actually that it comes down to what you do with it. Where do you put your priorities? Do you punish the guilty or protect the innocent? The reason society fell in that book is not because the robots were there.

Your portrayal of the subjectivity of Uncharles, the robot protagonist of Service Model, felt so real to me. What went into your thinking about how to portray that mind? And have you come across the idea that the neurobiology of emotion is bound up with cognition—so much so that without emotion, you’re not going to have a functioning intelligence?

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Our current understanding of intelligence involves a huge amount of cross-body input.  An awful lot of what drives us comes from the gut, from internal organs which produce hormones that tell us what to feel about things, and then that motivates our thoughts. Emotion has been viewed as separate from cognition for a long time. That distinction is now very much broken down.

When we start to think about artificial intelligence, though, we basically go back 20 or 30 years in what we think intelligence is. We go back to the idea that you can have a kind of cold, calculating intelligence—a cerebral intellect that is not mediated by emotions. Cutting-edge science knows that all these things are muddied together, but it’s a readily graspable narrative that you can have something that is entirely rational. And in fiction, this is usually presented as a bad thing. The idea is that if you strip away that emotional layer, you are left with something that will make terrible decisions—which isn’t necessarily true.

Moving on to the first half of your question: How does one write Uncharles? Uncharles does not believe he has free will. By his own reckoning, he’s following a chain of priorities and programming that has been given him. But he is very complicated, and these can interact in interesting ways. For example, there are multiple times when Uncharles is going to get destroyed and doesn’t particularly care, because it makes sense to him at the time and because of the logic chain he’s worked through.

One of the weird fallacies we have about AI is that if you got a genuine artificial intelligence, a reasoning intelligence, then it would try and stop you turning it off—like Skynet does, kicking off the whole Terminator franchise. But there’s no reason why self-preservation must come with sapience. You could have an enormously rich artificial intellect that wouldn’t care a damn if you turned it off. Not wanting to die is something we have evolved as part of our evolutionary fitness, because if you don’t die then you have more chance of having offspring, and therefore the predilection gets passed on. Any artificial creature we create isn’t going to have that. The only reason it would want not to die is if you tell it not to.

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Among the other minds you’ve explored are bears, dogs, arachnids, cephalopods, and a swarm of bees. What is your process? How do you balance the tension between being rooted in what is scientifically known and what is fair to speculate about?

I try to start with what is known from the research. In some cases, such as in Dogs of War, I ask, “What is being done to them?” Because obviously the bioforms in Dogs are at least partly artificial. After that it becomes a game of logical extrapolation. With a lot of these creatures I’m also working on the basis of, “What is the sensorium?” That is an extremely good shortcut to presenting something alien to people. Spiders and octopuses and dogs all experience the world very differently.

This year I also released Shroud, where the alien species lives in a world of sound and electromagnetic radiation rather than sight. You get to see contrast between what the human characters see and believe, and then what the world looks like to the aliens accompanying them. Currently I’m working on a book featuring a weird human-alien interrelation where there’s a symbiosis going on, but the two halves of the symbiont understand the situation in very different ways.

Evolution is essentially biological complexity into the fourth dimension.

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That touches on a question I wanted to ask about the experience of a collective intelligence. For an ecological system—or even an entire planet—to be an organism doesn’t necessarily mean the organism is cognitive like an animal is. In Alien Clay, though, I thought you did suggest that the planet Kiln’s ecology was intelligent in that animal-like sense—but you didn’t describe its inner life. Is that a fair reading? And have you ever thought about exploring the subjectivity of an ecosystem that is also an organism?

That’s a good reading. I’m playing with the idea of emergent complexity; because everything in the biosphere of Kiln is extremely interconnected, you get a sufficiently complex system that becomes aware of itself in some measure. That is probably the least scientific part of that book. It’s extremely hand-wavy.

On the other hand, we do know that there is a great deal of informational interplay between plants to fungi to other plants. There is, at that informational level, a great deal more complexity going on than we’ve traditionally accepted. So who knows, on an alien world which is very heavily into symbiosis as its major evolutionary model, how that might go?

It’s worth noting that the conscious planet is an extremely old sci-fi idea. Stanislav Lem wrote about it [in 1961] in Solaris. It’s even there in the Avatar movies. It would have been nice to have that explored more and things blow up less, but that wasn’t the sort of film it was going to be.

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Of course Kiln is imaginary—but many of the ecosystems you imagine are here on Earth, accelerated into the future.

There is so much crazy stuff happening on Earth that we’ve discovered recently and that people are generally not aware of. I want to keep flagging up the idea that none of this is as crazy as it sounds because a whole bunch of this stuff is really going on.

It’s like the mite on the army ant’s foot, which is one of my favorite mad pieces of evolution. There is a mite who hitches a ride on the feet of army ants; it basically just clasped on, but then ants need to do ant-foot things to function, so the mite has evolved to act like a little prosthetic foot. It links up with other ants when they’re forming a bridge, and all that sort of thing, because otherwise the ant giving it a ride would not be able to keep up. From what is a fundamentally parasitic start, they’ve become this sort of weird symbiont.

You can imagine what this might become if you give it a few more million years of evolution. What if the mites become better than an ant’s actual foot, and the ants evolve to make use of the mites, and you have this Kiln-style interdependence where the whole is greater than the sum of its parts?

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I’ve always been fascinated with evolution, which is essentially biological complexity into the fourth dimension. I love going back to earlier periods of Earth and seeing all the very weird stuff that might have become the model for animals going forward but by whatever chance turned out not to be. Burgess Shale, Cambrian fauna—that kind of biological diversity is endlessly fascinating.

Science, if it is being conducted honestly, is going to come into conflict with authoritarianism.

When you describe a particular view of evolution as a political project, I think of how in Alien Clay, a different understanding of ecology—not as red-in-tooth-and-claw, but as cooperative—is also intertwined with an anti-authoritarian political movement. Was that meant as a parable?

People seized on a very simplified understanding of Darwinian evolution: Survival of the fittest, thing-eating-other-thing, the idea that evolution progresses as a series of knockout battles where the winner carries on into the next historical era where it will meet up with the reigning champion—which is not how evolution works.

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In an upcoming book I talk about mantis shrimps. They are very simple creatures by human standards, but they are very dangerous to one another and they live in densely packed environments. They have evolved this incredible set of behaviors to get on with one another; they have essentially become much more complex and intelligent because of the presence of other mantis shrimps. And those who are better at reading other mantis shrimps and behaving appropriately toward them will do better.

This idea that everything has to be in competition with each other is not necessarily true. Everything essentially has to work out how to work with other things, whether that’s their own species or other species or the environment as a whole. That’s what people don’t tend to get about Darwinian survival of the fittest. The basic concept of Alien Clay is that I wanted to take a world where that side of the biosphere’s evolution—the better you are at working with other creatures of all types, the more fit you are to survive—had become the dominant one.

That leads to my final question: In Saturation Point, you repeat the adage “all things change, and we change with them.” In the context of the ecological upheaval now happening, what does that mean?

It will change us. The problem is that we think we can hold back the tide, that human society is proof against this change. And of course it’s not.

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People like to believe that things can be the same as they were 40 years ago, that you can turn back the clock. We can’t. Everything does change, but we are not mentally equipped to have a longevity of perspective. We believe the time we live in is going to be infinitely preservable or can be perfected into some kind of notional past Golden Age. There is no Golden Age.

We are going to be changed. Do we change organically, in order to roll with those punches? Or is it going to be like the dam that changes because eventually the pressure becomes so great that it breaks, and everything is left in ruin? Gradual change is something you can adapt to. Sudden change is something you can’t.

Lead image: VesnaArt / Shutterstock

Brandon Keim

Posted on June 20, 2025

Brandon Keim (Substack | Instagram |Twitter | Mastodon) is a freelance journalist and contributing editor at Nautilus. His new book, Meet the Neighbors, explores what the science of animal intelligence means for how we understand and live with the wild creatures around us.

Astronomy

- The Woman Behind the World’s Biggest Camera

- How to Build a Planet from Dust

ASTRONOMY | VIEW ON WEBSITE

The Woman Behind the World’s Biggest Camera

Vera Rubin overcame abundant obstacles to become a leading light in cosmology

By Molly Glick    June 23, 2025

Today, the world will get its first glimpse at the cosmos through the eyes of the Vera C. Rubin Observatory, which is perched atop Cerro Pachón, a nearly 9,000-foot peak in Chile. The Rubin Observatory is kicking off a decade-long “movie” shoot: With the world’s largest camera ever constructed and one of the most powerful telescopes, the observatory will capture vast swaths of the visible sky, providing a super-crisp, unprecedented “time-lapse” of the universe. To check out the earliest public images, you can even join a watch party near you.

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But who is the observatory’s namesake astronomer?

Vera Rubin is best known for presenting the first sound evidence of dark matter—an elusive substance that makes up more than 80 percent of our universe, yet doesn’t interact with light or other electromagnetic radiation, making it impossible to glimpse directly through a telescope. Her central scientific accomplishment involved discovering a mismatch between the predicted angular motion of galaxies and the observed motion of galaxies. Rubin’s calculations offered a solution to this so-called “galaxy rotation problem” by suggesting that galaxies must contain at least 10 times as much mass as can be accounted for by the visible stars. This invisible mass constituted evidence for what astronomers had earlier proposed to be dark matter.

Rubin became a cosmological giant against the odds, illuminating a path for future female astronomers. Rubin, who passed away at age 88 in 2016, dreamed of space from an early age, constructing a telescope out of cardboard as a child. Yet as early as high school, she was urged to avoid a career in science. Rubin ignored this advice and attended Vassar College in New York because the first nationally recognized female astronomer, Maria Mitchell, had taught there in the institution’s early years. She went on to juggle family and her studies, earning her Master’s degree at Cornell University, where she studied under Richard Feynman and others, and then a doctorate from Georgetown University in 1954 while caring for four children. Even as a graduate student, her observations of galactic dynamics were years ahead of their time.

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Throughout her career, Rubin encountered glaring sexism, including pushback from observatories she sought to use for her work. The Palomar Observatory in California, for instance, didn’t even have a women’s bathroom when she arrived there in 1964. Rubin, the first woman invited to use the observatory, responded by taping a cut-out of a paper skirt to the stick figure on the door of the men’s room.

Rubin worked tirelessly to eliminate obstacles for female astronomers. Noticing that women researchers were almost never elected to the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, and rarely won prizes from the American Astronomical Society, she persistently nominated female scientists for these accolades and encouraged others to follow suit. Rubin is also remembered for mentoring promising female astronomers.

Today, the Vera Rubin observatory will carry on her legacy—by combing through billions of far-off galaxies, the powerful camera could pick up on new hints of dark matter twisting the shapes of galaxies as they spin through the cosmos.

Lead photo: Vera Rubin measuring spectra in 1974 at the Department of Terrestrial Magnetism at the Carnegie Institution. Credit: NOIRLab / NSF / AURA / Wikipedia

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Molly Glick

Posted on June 23, 2025

Molly Glick is the newsletter editor of Nautilus.

ASTRONOMY | VIEW ON WEBSITE

How to Build a Planet from Dust

The answer is blowing in the (stellar) wind

By Katherine Harmon Courage    June 17, 2025

Interstellar dust tends to be very, very small. Take your average dust mote floating in a ray of sunlight here on Earth and shrink it down to about 1,000th of its size, then you have a typical grain of space dust. So scientists have long wondered how such small things could ever accumulate into something so large as a pebble, let alone an entire rocky planet.

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In fact, models have pointed to something known as the “meter-size barrier” as a hurdle to creating a planet from accreting cosmic dust. Researchers have long considered this barrier because dust amalgamations, as they grow, are at a near constant risk of being smashed into smaller bits or getting pulled into their newly forming star.

But in the constellation of Taurus, just 450 light-years from Earth, swirling disks of protoplanetary material are revealing how this long-standing barrier problem might be solved. A new study, published simply under the title “FAUST” (short for: Fifty AU STudy of the chemistry in the disk-envelope systems of Solar-like protostars) in Astronomy & Astrophysics suggests the answer, my friend, is blowing in the wind.

Using a cluster of high-powered telescopes in Chile called the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array, scientists have tracked hefty—1-millimeter-sized—clumps of dust being swept out of the crowded center of this binary star system by cosmic winds and to the calmer outer edges. (When stars are forming, as they are here, they spew gas and other particles outward, creating what is known as protostellar winds.) There, away from the new stars’ gravity and violent maelstrom of other dust particles, those fortunate particles have the chance to grow, gathering more material, before migrating back, bigger and stronger, having crossed the meter-size barrier.

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These observations “bring us closer to understanding our cosmic origins,” Claire Chandler, a scientist with the National Science Foundation’s National Radio Astronomy Observatory and collaborator in the new research, said in a statement. And show how even some of the smallest cosmic specs might ride to temporary safety on a gust of wind.

Lead image: B. Saxton U.S. National Science Foundation/NSF National Radio Astronomy Observatory

Katherine Harmon Courage

Posted on June 17, 2025

Katherine Harmon Courage is the executive editor at Nautilus.

Communication

- The Octopus Propaganda Hidden in Modern Maps

COMMUNICATION | VIEW ON WEBSITE

The Octopus Propaganda Hidden in Modern Maps

An old visual trick may promote conspiratorial thinking about global power

By Molly Glick    June 16, 2025

For centuries, an odd form of iconography has maintained a stranglehold over the globe: the octopus map. Political cartoonists and mapmakers have long used the creature to illustrate a wide variety of forces threatening to throttle their foes: from empires, religious groups, and ideologies to financial systems—even abstract concepts such as the great unknown.

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Take famed British satirist Fred W. Rose’s 1877 map, which depicted Russia as an octopus slithering its many arms around the globe. It was published shortly after Russia attacked the Ottoman Empire. Map-dwelling military octopuses multiplied through the 20th century: They were commonly drawn during both World Wars, for instance, by satirists and cartoonists on both sides of these conflicts. Today, subtle echoes of these forms persist in data visualizations, which have become popular forms of communication both in the media and for fringe political groups. Many of these data maps feature radiating series of outstretched lines and arrows wrapping like tentacles around continents, including depictions of immigration.

Michael Correll, a data visualization researcher, and his colleagues at Northeastern University wondered if these data-driven images were making subconscious appeals to audiences’ emotions, so they set out to assess how octopus iconography works on the mind. They approached the question from two different angles: analysis of historical examples and an empirical study of human participant responses. What they found is that even subtle octopus imagery in maps can inspire conspiratorial thinking in viewers. They published their results this spring.

DATA DECEPTION: Correll and his colleagues found that subtle, octopus-like maps, like the map on the left, can promote conspiratorial thinking to a similar degree as more overt ones, like the map on the right, do. Images by Shani Spivak, Eduardo Puerta, and Michael Correll.

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For the empirical arm of the study, they designed a series of maps that illustrated connections between a fictitious country called Huskiland and its military bases in neighboring nations, meant to appear in an international newspaper. These maps ranged from overtly octopus-like to more subtly octopus-like, with lines between nations ending in circular nodes.

The team surveyed 256 participants, asking them to rate on a scale of one to seven how much they agreed with statements such as, “Huskiland is a central military power in the region” and “Huskiland uses these bases to exert military or political control over its neighbors.” These statements aligned with the common elements within octopus maps that the paper authors identified in historical examples, such as “Tentacularity,” “Reach,” and “Threat.”

Ultimately, their survey results indicated that even the more subtle maps “could still engender negative sentiments and attributions of ill-intent” on a similar scale to those with more overt octopus imagery. The team also noted that illustrating a country with a high number of links to its neighbors can denote particularly hostile relations. This suggests that it’s important to pay close attention to details in data visualizations, as they can have a major impact on audiences’ thinking.

“In the midst of the ‘rapid rise’ of emotional appeals in data visualization, and the ubiquity of data visualizations among conspiratorial groups,” the authors write, “we point to a need to examine the unique persuasive power of charts and maps, which often take advantage of a (falsely) assumed trustworthiness or objectivity of data.”

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In a statement Correll said, “There are lots of really subtle ways that we convince ourselves about what’s true in the world.”

Lead illustration by Udo Keppler / Wikimedia Commons

Molly Glick

Posted on June 16, 2025

Molly Glick is the newsletter editor of Nautilus.

Environment

- The Weird Cooling Effect of Wildfires

- We Are the Ocean

- If Oaks and Orchids Could Talk

ENVIRONMENT | VIEW ON WEBSITE

The Weird Cooling Effect of Wildfires

Smoke and dust from fires could block the sun, but that’s not necessarily a good thing

By Syris Valentine    June 25, 2025

Hardly two months into Canada’s historic wildfire season, the country is already well on its way to one of the most devastating fire seasons on record. The racing flames have claimed two lives and displaced more than 20,000 people in Manitoba alone, with most of the evacuees belonging to the province’s First Nations. Over 7.8 million acres have burned, exceeding the average area burned in a year, and forecasters predict the season will extend for at least another three months, maybe more. It’s a clear demonstration of how climate change has heightened the potential for tremendous blazes to tear through forests and prairies.

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Yet, most dominant climate models have failed to incorporate the rising rates of fire activity recorded in the Earth’s boreal forests. Instead, these models tend to assume that fire activity, and related emissions, would stay steady with levels logged in the late-2010s. In a paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in early June, a trio of researchers studied what would happen to climate projections if they ran new models that more accurately represented the severity of fire season in boreal forests over recent years and into the future.

What they found seems counterintuitive: According to the new models, the smoke from all the wildfires could actually dampen global warming by an estimated 12 percent. Dargan Frierson, atmospheric scientist and a co-author of the recent paper, says he was “expecting the opposite to happen.”

Warming is more than offset by the net cooling effect that the smoke and other aerosols create.

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To calculate the impact of increased fire activity on climate change, Frierson and his colleagues leveraged the Global Fire Emissions Database, which catalogs levels of smoke, soot, and CO_2 emitted by fires in a given year. They then analyzed the relationship between fire activity, fire-related emissions, and global temperatures between 1997 to 2023 and plugged these variables into existing climate change models.

“Forest fires have an effect on climate in a lot of ways,” says Frierson. These fires release smoke, carbon dioxide, methane, and all sorts of other pollutants—including sometimes toxic substances. Much of this mixture of emissions has a warming effect on the planet, whether by adding more greenhouse gases to the atmosphere or by darkening the surface of snow and ice, causing it to capture more heat and melt faster.

But the models Frierson and his colleagues ran found that this warming is more than offset by the net cooling effect that the smoke and other aerosols create when they brighten clouds and prevent some of the sun’s heat from ever reaching the surface. This even manages to keep some of the sea ice in the Arctic from melting; as a result, the ice lasts longer and stays thicker deeper into the summer and fall than it otherwise would, which leads to even more cooling in the winter compared to what most other climate models suggest.

Still, while Frierson and his team are able to state with some confidence that increased fire activity alone could reduce warming by 12 percent globally and 38 percent in the Arctic, Hamish Gordon, atmospheric scientist at Carnegie-Mellon University, says “the precise numbers are wildly uncertain.” Gordon doesn’t point that out to suggest there’s anything wrong with the paper itself. “I like the study,” he says, but the authors have to make a lot of assumptions and there are a lot of uncertainties inherent to climate modeling, especially when you’re dealing with aerosols like wildfire smoke, which remain one of the most challenging things for climate scientists to depict accurately in their models. Aerosols, tiny particles suspended in the atmosphere, behave in complex ways: some scatter light, others absorb heat, a few do both; all while they brighten clouds by multiplying water droplets, sometimes even causing spontaneous snowfall.

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Frierson himself even says, “the numbers shouldn’t be taken too seriously at this point.” The paper didn’t aim to determine the precise, definitive effect of increasing wildfires on the global climate. Instead, the researchers wanted to highlight the importance of accurately accounting for these emissions in future climate models, especially as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change prepares the reports in its seventh assessment cycle.

But even if future analyses reinforce the findings of Frierson and his collaborators and they conclude that an abundance of smoke can have a pronounced cooling effect on the planet and the arctic, that doesn’t mean these fires are somehow benign or benevolent. As a fire ecologist at University of Nevada Reno, Erin Hanan points out: “Changes in fire regime in boreal regions is an ecological and environmental and human health disaster.”

Lead image: thmphotographs / Shutterstock

Syris Valentine

Posted on June 25, 2025

Syris Valentine is an essayist and freelance journalist with a focus on climate and social justice. Outside of his newsletter “Just Progress,” his work has appeared in The Atlantic, Scientific American, Grist, and elsewhere.

ENVIRONMENT | VIEW ON WEBSITE

We Are the Ocean

Five redemptive days at the United Nations Ocean Conference in Nice, France

By Kevin Berger    June 16, 2025

The sun was setting on the ocean, but the voice of Whaia was rising. The singer from New Zealand, rooted in Maori and Pasifika ancestry, was lifting our spirits with incantations that soared into wordless melodies that crested and fell like ocean waves. The spell was sustained by Scottish sound artist Brian d’Souza, performing under the name Auntie Flo, conjuring the sea in electronic, undulating soundscapes.

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I was among listeners in Nice, France, in the Theatre de Verdure, an outdoor amphitheater on the coast of the Mediterranean Sea. It was the first evening of the United Nations Ocean Conference, a five-day gathering of world dignitaries, conservationists, scientists, and academics, meeting and sharing plans to conserve our troubled oceans. For the five days, Theatre de Verdure was known as Nautilus Village. In collaboration with the United Nations and the city of Nice, Nautilus hosted music, films, and discussion panels under the Côte d’Azur sky.

The Indigenous singer and sound artist were not headliners at the conference. But their evocation of our innate connection to the ocean was a theme that ran through the heart of its speeches and conversations.

“The ocean is the lifeblood of our planet,” Antonio Guterres, United Nations Secretary-General, said in his opening remarks. “It produces half of the oxygen we breathe, nourishes billions of people, supports hundreds of millions of jobs, and underpins global trade. For many, the ocean is more than a source of food and livelihood. It shapes cultures, anchors identities, and feeds the soul.”

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I appreciated that Guterres then went goth on the gathered.

The ocean is under siege, he said. “Fish populations are collapsing due to reckless illegal fishing and overexploitation. Climate change is driving ocean acidification and heating—destroying coral reefs, accelerating sea level rise, and threatening communities worldwide. And plastic pollution is choking marine life and infesting our food chain—ultimately ending up in our blood and even our brains. When we poison the ocean, we poison ourselves.”

“Those who contribute negligibly suffer the most,” said the prime minister of Tuvalu, a tiny Pacific island.

What was the source of the poison? “Its name is greed,” Guterres said. “Greed that sows doubt, denies science, distorts truth, rewards corruption, and destroys life for profit.”

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There was another name for poison at the conference. Dignitaries were reluctant to mention it. But it was apparent to most everybody, and on occasion, speakers, shaking their heads and mumbling in resigned desperation, did let the name slip: the United States.

The U.S. had a negligible presence at the conference. Trump administration plans to fuel up oceangoing heavy equipment to mine seabeds for minerals, along with strafing public budgets for ocean and climate change research, were black smudges on the restorative blue vision of the conference.

Ninety-five countries signed a global treaty to reduce plastic pollution in the ocean. The U.S. produces the most plastic waste on the planet, 40 million tons annually, 20 percent of which spends its eternal days in the entrails of the ocean. The U.S. did not sign the plastics treaty.

Fifty countries and the European Union have ratified the “High Seas Treaty,” an ambitious plan to protect 30 percent of the ocean by 2030 (2.8 percent is protected now). The treaty would bind countries to enter an agreement to protect the ocean under plans that transcend national borders. With 60 signatories, the High Seas Treaty would be implemented by the United Nations. The U.S. did not ratify. So far, neither have China and India.

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“It’s considerably difficult to work on the ocean right now when the United States has withdrawn from almost everything,” Olivier Poivre D’Arvor, the special envoy of the French Republic, said during his wrap-up of the conference to the press. (He spoke in French; I’m quoting the English translator I heard in headphones.)

Difficult because, as we know, the U.S. is one of the three industrial powerhouses that blast most of the greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, whose fallout is unraveling the ecological health of the ocean. “It’s suffering from high fever and now we see oceans under the threat of dying—we are simply condemned to work together collectively,” said Jean-Noël Barrot, France’s Minister for Foreign Affairs, in an impressively impassioned speech.

THE TWO CULTURES: During his wrap-up of the ocean conference, Olivier Poivre D’Arvor, the special envoy of the French Republic, compared scientists fleeing the U.S. today to artists coming to France in the early 20th century in search of freedom. Photo by Kevin Berger.

Indeed, the participation of industrial giants like the U.S., China, and India in international efforts to nurse the ocean back to health are paramount. Without them, small countries, especially island nations, can do little but canvass for international funds to build barricades to stem the rising sea. When it comes to the causes of global warming, and oceans storming island shores, “Those who contribute negligibly suffer the most,” said Feleti Teo, prime minister of Tuvalu, a tiny country of nine islands, located between Hawaii and Australia, often seen as a microcosm of what dire climate change looks like now.

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Special Envoy Poivre D’Arvor is a cultural man of presence in France: a novelist, literary scholar, theater producer, and French ambassador for maritime matters around the world; he has been the president of France’s National Navy Museum for the past decade. “The real damage in the U.S. is to science culture,” he said. He added that American scientists were coming to France in search of the “same kind of freedom that American artists once did.”

I assume Poivre D’Arvor was referring to Black Americans fleeing Jim Crow laws in the first half of the 20th century, such as jazz artists Josephine Baker and Duke Ellington, writer Langston Hughes, and painter Loïs Mailou Jones. Who knows if scientists will now find the same receptive audiences in labs and universities? But it was a surprisingly poignant comparison.

Although the international effort to reverse the damage being done to the ocean is stymied by the absence of the U.S., “We can advance our progress without them,” Poive D’Arvor said defiantly. The High Seas Treaty is on the verge of being fully ratified without the U.S., and its implementation, Poive D’Arvor said, would be “a victory for science.” Referring to the Nice conference as a whole, he said, “We did what we had to do here.”

It’s easy to take a cynical view. All the good will and international plans at the conference can be capsized like a tiny sailboat by the hurricane of oil companies, plastic manufacturers, consumerism, and intransigent politicians.

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Speaking as one person in attendance, though, I felt better about the world than I have in a long time. It was such a relief to have slipped as if through a magic door out of the oppressive climate of authoritarianism, ignorance, and us-versus-them hatred and fear. How amazing it was to be in a community of people of every race and creed—smart, considerate, dedicated people thinking beyond themselves. The incantatory spell of the singer Whaia wasn’t broken for five whole days. We were all connected by the spirit and redemption of the ocean.

Lead art: Singer Whaia and sound artist Brian d’Souza on stage at the “Nautilus Village” during the United Nations Ocean Conference in Nice, France. Photo by Kevin Berger.

Kevin Berger

Posted on June 16, 2025

Kevin Berger is the editor at large of Nautilus.

ENVIRONMENT | VIEW ON WEBSITE

If Oaks and Orchids Could Talk

Lucas Gutierrez wants to turn plant frequencies into a language humans can understand

By Vittoria Traverso    June 16, 2025

On a crisp April morning, Lucas Gutierrez, a multidisciplinary artist based in Berlin, walks over to a 150-year-old oak inside Castello di Potentino’s wine estate in Tuscany. “This branch should work,” he says, and carefully places two small electrodes on each side of a leaf. A few seconds later, the screen of the device attached to the electrodes lights up. “It’s picking something up,” Gutierrez says.

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Plants generate electrical signals when chloride ions and other compounds move across cell membranes during activities like photosynthesis or respiration, the conversion of oxygen and sugars into energy. Similar to an EEG machine, where electrodes are applied to the skull to detect brainwaves, the device used by Gutierrez, which is called a MIDI Sprout, can detect plants’ electrical signals and convert them into audio files.

For the past year, Gutierrez has been recording not just oaks, but orchids, vines, and olive trees to map the invisible lives of plants in this part of Tuscany and then translating these recordings into music. Each plant recording is distinct: Younger plants and plants with more leaves tend to be busier with electrical signaling, says Gutierrez. And his recordings of orchids translate into more tonal variation compared with those of oaks. In the case of the Potentino oak, the electric waves pulsing through the branches emerged as an eerie, ethereal low-pitched harmony.

Oaks

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Orchids

Gutierrez says he may ultimately turn the various audio samples he collects into a “symphony.” It’s all part of an ongoing project he calls Denizens, which includes not just translations of plant signals into music but also visual arrangements like laser projections and even textile art. By transforming these frequencies into audio recordings and other media, Gutierrez hopes to gain a new appreciation of the inner lives of plants.

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After recording the oak, Gutierrez says he played the audio track he had created back to Charlotte Horton, the owner of Potentino’s Wine Estate, asking her to guess which plant she was listening to. “She got it right at her first guess,” Gutierrez says. With a sample size of one, and no controls or standards of measurement, his results are more speculative than scientific. But it made him wonder if humans can subconsciously pick up on plant frequencies, and whether “turning them into sounds can help us become aware of it.”

Gutierrez also started to notice patterns, he says. For example, vine frequencies recorded during the hottest time of the day showed more variation than those captured in the early morning. Wind also seemed to affect the electrical signals he was picking up. “Plants seem to be synched with their surroundings,” Gutierrez says. “With each recording I started to wonder if these variations can be considered a form of language.”

HEARD IT THROUGH THE GRAPEVINE: Lucas Gutierrez has spent the past year recording electrical signals emitted by plants, including this grapevine at Castello di Potentino’s wine estate in Tuscany. First, he uses AI to spot patterns in the raw data. Then, he looks for a way to represent those patterns musically, choosing scales, rhythms, and keys that fit well with the fluctuations of each data set. Photo courtesy of Lucas Gutierrez.

Gutierrez is not the first to describe plant signaling as a form of language, of course. In recent years, researchers have increasingly begun to talk about the chemical and auditory cues plants emit into their environments using words that are usually applied to humans or the animal kingdom. Words like “communication.”

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Richard Karban, Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Entomology at the University of California, Davis and author of Plant Sensing and Communication, is one of many researchers who have studied plant signaling. He and others have gathered evidence that plants attacked by herbivores emit VOCs (volatile organic compounds) into the atmosphere that can be detected by neighboring plants, which strengthen their own defense mechanisms in response. Karban believes this is a form of language, though not everyone agrees with him.

“Some people argue that communication requires a brain,” he says. “And others think that communication requires intentionality.” Plants lack a brain, but intentionality is very hard to prove even for animals or humans, he says. Other scientists have noticed that plants sometimes emit sounds at ultrasonic frequencies when they are water stressed, and that insects may rely on these sounds to determine where to lay their eggs.

During his informal explorations, Gutierrez also noticed that plants seem to react to human acoustic vibrations, something scientists too are exploring. Last summer, he asked a group of local farmer-musicians, the Cardellini, to sing traditional folk songs in front of a vine row inside Potentino’s estate. Using his MIDI Sprout device, he recorded the electrical frequencies of the vines before, during, and after the singing. “Within 15 minutes of singing the device picked up a big change in activity,” he says.

“I am not a scientist so I am not looking for definitive data,” he explains, “but it makes sense to me that plants would sense us and react to us,” he says. “I feel like I stumbled on an invisible vocabulary,” he says, “and I hope that by turning it into art we can become more aware of it.”

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A film about Gutizerrez’s Denizens project premiered at the Castello di Potentino Documentary Film Festival in Tuscany last August and will run again from August 7 to 10 of this year during a festival dedicated to the theme of interspecies communication. The project is funded by the winery’s non-profit arm Friends of Potentino, which supports work related to environmental and cultural preservation.

Lead image by Tasnuva Elahi; with images by Molibdenis-Studio and Gst01 / Shutterstock

Vittoria Traverso

Posted on June 16, 2025

Vittoria Traverso is a freelance writer based in Italy and the U.S. who is interested in stories that can help us see the world differently.

Health

- Sleep Has No Magic Number

- How To Tell If You’re Dead

HEALTH | VIEW ON WEBSITE

Sleep Has No Magic Number

People who sleep according to their culture’s norms are healthier overall

By Katharine Gammon    June 18, 2025

In Japan, late nights are a way of life—the final trains of the night are often packed with people traveling back home in the midnight hours from work or a night out. In fact, studies consistently find that people living in Japan get far fewer winks per night than people living in other parts of the world. And yet, Japan also has the longest average lifespan of any of the world’s most advanced economies. There are a lot of elderly people out and about.

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This presents a paradox. Sleep research has consistently shown that people who sleep fewer hours suffer poorer health outcomes and even live shorter lives. So how can Japanese people sleep so little and still seem to thrive into old age?

Christine Ou, an assistant professor at the University of Victoria School of Nursing in Canada, together with her husband Steven Heine, a professor of cultural psychology at the University of British Columbia, decided to dive into this question of how culturally distinct differences in sleep duration impact health with a study of 5,000 people from 20 different countries.

“Essentially, we asked: Is there a universal amount of sleep that’s healthiest for everyone, or does that ideal vary by country?” says Ou. “And do people feel healthier when their sleep matches what’s typical or expected of a culture?”

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You can’t use eight hours as a magic number.

Together with a team of other researchers, they found that the range of sleep time varied widely from 6 hours and 18 minutes per night for Japan to 7 hours and 52 minutes per night for France (the United States was near the low end of the spectrum of sleep duration, with about 7 hours each night).

But when they looked at the relationship between individuals’ health and their sleep habits, controlling for factors like smoking and dietary nutrition, they found the amount of sleep needed for optimal health was lower for people from countries with shorter average sleep times. They also found that people from countries that have shorter average sleep durations did not have shorter life expectancies, nor higher rates of heart disease or diabetes. These short-sleeping cultures actually had lower rates of obesity than people living in countries with longer average sleep times.

“This suggests that we are learning how to sleep from our culture, and that is shaping the processes of our sleep,” Heine says. The research was published in the journal PNAS last month.

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The team of researchers also found that people tended to be healthier if their sleep habits closely matched the norms of where they were living than if they diverged. This aligns with other research, they say, that shows that when people fit in culturally with others in the places where they are living—in what they eat or how they show emotions—their health is better overall.

It’s not just a matter of genetics. The behavior, and the physiological response to it, may well be learned, the researchers suggest. Having a sleep schedule that is aligned with that of others in one’s community could help reduce stress related to scheduling, they suggest. “Our basic physiological needs are shaped by how we interact with our cultures,” says Ou.

A person’s needs can also shift when they move to a new area with a distinct culture, they say. A previous study from the group showed university students in Japan slept an hour less than university students in Canada—but still felt less sleepy and had better health—while East Asian Canadian students had sleep behaviors and attitudes that were more similar to those of European Canadians. “That suggests that we are shaped by our local culture in terms of how we go about sleep,” Heine says.

Heine says the findings raise interesting questions for future research, and hit on a broader phenomenon. “The way we get our sleep needs met is shaped by cultural learning,” he says. “There’s no single ideal amount of sleep that’s best for everyone. So you can’t use eight hours as a magic number.”

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The team is planning a future study to look into variations in the different sleep stages people go through over the course of a night—like deep sleep versus lighter sleep. For example, Heine wonders if cultures that sleep fewer hours may enter deep sleep faster than others—so that “French people probably are spending more time in some of the lighter stages of sleep than, say, Japanese people.”

Anders Fjell, a psychologist at the University of Oslo in Norway, says the study was new in using cross-cultural comparisons to show that sleep has an important cultural component. “The study shows that the most healthy people have different sleep durations related to how society looks at the importance of amount of sleep,” he says.

He adds that the findings suggest that natural variation in sleep duration does not have a strong causal effect on health, and instead varies as a function of individual and cultural factors. Sleep duration “should not only be considered from a biomedical point of view,” he says.

Most people are still sleeping too little, says Ou—the study findings also suggested that the average sleep duration for each of the countries was lower than what is optimal for one’s health in that country. So although there is no single amount of sleep that is ideal for everyone in the world, most people could benefit from some extra rest, say Ou. No matter where you live or when you go to bed, she says, “you’re probably not getting enough sleep.”

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Lead image: jenny on the moon / Shutterstock

Katharine Gammon

Posted on June 18, 2025

Katharine Gammon is a freelance science writer based in Santa Monica, California, who writes about environment, science, and parenting. You can find her on X (formerly known as Twitter) @kategammon.

HEALTH | VIEW ON WEBSITE

How To Tell If You’re Dead

The line between life and death has never been clear—and modern technology blurs it further

By Amanda Heidt    June 16, 2025    Illustration by Ellen Weinstein

Jimo Borjigin never intended to study death. Back in the mid-2010s, the  consciousness researcher at the University of Michigan Medical School in Ann Arbor was instead interested in circadian rhythms, the internal cycles that regulate our physical, mental, and behavioral states throughout each day. The circadian clock is a bit of a black box, Borjigin says, so to study it she and her team developed an automated system to continuously monitor neurotransmitters that regulate circadian rhythms in rats.

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Over the course of her research, the scientists tracked the animals for weeks at a time, and Borjigin began to notice something unusual. A few of the animals died while under observation, and when they did, the researchers’ sensors recorded a massive and unexpected spike in serotonin for up to 30 seconds after their hearts stopped beating. In humans, serotonin dysregulation has been linked to intense hallucinations, but Borjigin didn’t know what to make of such a finding in the context of rats. Or in death. Like any good scientist, she looked to the literature.

“I was sure we must know everything there is about the death process already, but when I went looking for evidence of this serotonin spike, I found nothing,” she says. “Looking into the research on death more broadly, I was shocked at how little we truly understand about this thing that happens to every one of us.”

“Cadavers are often in a state of reversibility for hours, if not days, postmortem.”

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The experience prompted a shift in Borjigin’s research focus, and today she studies consciousness in relation to death and near-death experiences. In 2023, she and her colleagues published a contentious finding: that humans, like her rats, also experience a dramatic shift in brain activity when we die. The team monitored four comatose patients as they were taken off life support, and in two cases, detected a spike in gamma waves—the fastest type of brain wave, most active during periods of intense focus or problem solving—in a part of the brain correlated with dreaming, visual hallucinations, and altered states of consciousness. “To me, this suggests a covert consciousness that is not usually observed by bystanders who might otherwise look at a person and think they are unresponsive,” she says. “If that’s true, it definitely makes me think we need to revisit our definition of death.”

While Borjigin acknowledges that her work is preliminary, her observations and others like them show just how blurry the line between life and death has become, and how much science still stands to learn about such a pivotal event. As technological advances increasingly allow researchers to study death—including interventions that now allow for the use of so-called living cadavers in scientific research—so too have they necessitated new, oftentimes fraught conversations about the nature of death, its biological and societal underpinnings, and whether existing legal definitions are in alignment with current medical standards.

“The somewhat contentious space that we’re in right now is that we have different ways that we can say that someone is dead, and not all of them agree with each other. There are legal definitions and medical ones, social definitions, and many different religious interpretations,” says L. Syd M. Johnson, a neuroethicist at SUNY Upstate Medical University in Syracuse. “It’s a surprisingly complicated question, but that also makes this an exciting time to be considering it.”

Across many cultures, life has been linked not to our bodies, but to intangible souls, and so questions of death remained most squarely in the purview of religious representatives. Early definitions associated with Western religions in the mid 1700s timestamped death using the soul’s departure from the body. It wasn’t until about a century later that the first biological description of death—the cessation of heart action and breathing—appeared in a medical text, 1873’s Manual of Medical Jurisprudence, written by Alfred Swaine Taylor, a British toxicologist and medical writer. This so-called cardiopulmonary concept dominated scientific thinking for the next century, and remains the most common criteria by which doctors declare someone dead today.

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But medical advances, including interventions such as CPR and organ transplantation and the emergence of technologies including ventilators and defibrillators, have increasingly clouded that definition. People who might once have died from drowning or heart failure can now be resuscitated, receive an organ transplant, or even have their circulation artificially maintained. Death, many scientists now argue, is better thought of not as an absolute, but as a complex and evolving process that can sometimes be reversed with proper care.

“Irreversibility is just a reflection of a lack of medical treatments, which we’re developing more of all the time,” says Sam Parnia, a clinician at NYU Langone Medical Center in New York City who focuses on cardiac arrest. “We see now that death is a continuum, and cadavers are often in a state of reversibility for hours, if not days postmortem.”

The emergence of neuroscience as a discipline prompted even more rethinking on death. In 1968, a committee based at Harvard University met to establish a definition centered around neurological criteria. In their final report, the group described death, in part, as an “irreversible coma,” a term they used somewhat interchangeably with what we would today refer to as brain death.

Illustration by Ellen Weinstein

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Not everyone agreed with this approach, with one researcher calling the recommendations “a bane for bioethicists from day one.” At the time, the question of when to stop providing life support was not clearly differentiated from the question of when a patient was dead, and the group’s chair, Harvard anesthesiologist Henry Beecher, referenced a hypothetical future in which “hopelessly unconscious” patients would take up space in hospitals at enormous cost. Others were hesitant to declare death too soon, however, worried that premature declarations could be rushed to kickstart the harvesting of organs for donation.

Some of this contention was settled with the passing of the Uniform Determination of Death Act (UDDA) in 1981, a model United States law intended to help states craft their own unified policies. The UDDA sought to bridge the cardiopulmonary and brain-based concepts, defining death as either the irreversible cessation of circulatory and respiratory functions or the irreversible cessation of all functions of the entire brain, including the brain stem. This latter point acknowledges that it’s the brainstem that controls essential, automatic functions such as breathing, heart rate, and blood pressure, and its inclusion places the UDDA more in line with a “whole-brain” approach rather than a “higher brain” model focusing on consciousness as a hallmark of life. Today, medical professionals use UDDA criteria when declaring someone dead, kickstarting the legal, social, and clinical processes that come next, including organ donation, mourning rituals, and the settling of a person’s personal affairs.

The UDDA has generally been successful in its purpose for the past 40 years, says David Magnus, the director of the Stanford Center for Biomedical Ethics in California, even though it too has garnered its share of controversy. “The UDDA is an amazingly successful policy—tens of millions of people die each year, and we’re generally not arguing over that because of the criteria we have,” he says. “Having said that, a feeling has grown over time that there’s a lack of fit between the actual language of the law and the details of clinical practice, such that we’re now reconsidering our definitions once again.”

Many of the arguments around how we define death stem from a lack of consensus over what tests or metrics should be used to verify that death has occurred, and how much philosophy should factor into medical or legal decisions.

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For example, since the passing of the UDDA, researchers have found that the hypothalamus—a brain region that regulates appetite, sleep, and hormone release—often continues to function for longer than the rest of the brain after death. This prolonged hypothalamic activity results from that region receiving some blood flow from a different source than the rest of the brain. While most blood flow makes its way to the brain from the carotid arteries in the neck, the hypothalamus is also supplied via a network of arteries at the base of the brain called the circle of Willis. Medical professionals largely agree that a functioning hypothalamus isn’t a meaningful sign of life, but some physicians have suggested that an additional test for this should be added to the criteria for declaring death. Doing so would necessitate rewriting the UDDA, however, and its reference to a cessation of function across the entire brain.

Piotr Nowak, a bioethicist at Jagiellonian University in Kraków, Poland, notes that there are also several cases over the past few decades that show how ambiguities in laws about determining clinical death can create confusion. Many questions involve considerations of consciousness—a more philosophical aspect that does not come, yet, with its own set of medical tests.

Among the most famous of these cases involves Jahi McMath, a California teenager who was declared brain-dead in 2013 at the age of 13 following complications from a tonsillectomy. Her family resisted the declaration, and McMath was kept on life support for another four years, continuing to develop, undergoing puberty, and appearing to demonstrate some responsive behaviors, such as small movements and sporadic changes in her heart rate, before dying from liver failure in 2018. McMath’s story echoes others in which people have regained consciousness following long periods of brain death, alongside animal studies showing that at least some brain function can be restored in pigs hours after death. “It’s clear our understanding of our own mind remains incomplete in ways that make medical and policy choices difficult,” Nowak says.

“We still have no idea how it is that something like a brain cell can create something like a thought.”

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In response to the changing medical landscape, including clinical innovations and what they have revealed about the human brain, bioethicists, medical professionals, lawyers, representatives from advocacy groups, and others have been coming together to rethink what brain death actually means. One group, called the World Brain Death Project, has been working to establish an international framework for brain death, while in the U.S., a group met in 2021 to gauge whether an update to the UDDA might now be needed. The group agreed on the necessity of an update but failed to reach a universal agreement, and today, the law remains as originally written.

Even so, Magnus, who participated in the discussions, says the meetings were productive and worthwhile in bringing together the leading minds pondering the question of death and how we define it. Magnus, for example, was able to introduce his own definition, called the neuro-respiratory concept, that he says could clarify some of the current confusion. Under these criteria, a person can be declared dead if they suffer a brain injury “leading to permanent loss of the capacity for consciousness, the ability to breathe spontaneously, and brainstem reflexes”—wording that Magnus says would bring the law into alignment with the most common criteria for declaring deaths used by medical professionals today.

Such discussions are particularly critical right now, he adds, because the advent of successful experimentation with brain-dead bodies in fields as disparate as organ transplantation and drug delivery has returned this question to the public spotlight. In 2016, for example, a company called Bioquark announced a controversial plan to regenerate neurons in the brains of recently-deceased patients by injecting their brains with stem cells and other materials. While the company’s attempts were ultimately unsuccessful, the underlying work lives on in the research of one of its original physicians, who has since carried out similar experiments on roughly 30 cadavers as recently as last year. And in 2024, a pig liver was successfully transplanted into a living cadaver—with permission from the clinically dead person’s family—and continued to function for 10 days before being removed.

“There are all the medical and legal reasons we need a standardized definition of death that at least most of us can agree on, but there’s also an ethical reason when it comes to communicating with families and with the public,” Magnus says. “When you’re working in such a fraught area as this, a lack of clarity can lead to some murky ethical choices that we need to be able to defend.”

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Some believe that sitting with uncertainty about when death occurs may ultimately allow us to gain new insights into this process and transformation that we might not see otherwise.

Steven Luper, a professor of philosophy at Trinity University in San Antonio, Texas, says that there’s a growing sentiment that the moment of death—perhaps the most personal experience there is—should be left to each of us to decide and communicate through a family member, religious figure, or end of life doula. “The goal for uniform criteria is to really help out the medical profession and the law, and some people have said that’s not a good enough reason to deprive people of their liberty,” he says. “Rather, some believe we should allow each person to define their own interpretation based on their personal narratives and world views.”

Researchers are also increasingly interested in bringing a scientific perspective to debates long considered the realm of philosophy, particularly around the idea of consciousness, which is inextricably linked to questions of life, identity, and death. One barrier to this type of research is the lack of reliable metrics for studying consciousness. In fact, Parnia notes that today, there is no definitive evidence that consciousness even emerges from the brain. “We still have no idea how it is that something like a brain cell can create something like a thought,” he says.

In a large, multicenter study published in 2023, Parnia and his colleagues analyzed patterns of brain activity—including delta, theta, and alpha waves, which together dictate brain activity and various states of arousal—in patients experiencing cardiac arrest, which Parnia says is biologically “indistinguishable from death.” The results suggest that consciousness and awareness may occur as long as an hour after a person’s heart has stopped beating. Furthermore, the brain wave patterns the team detected using electroencephalography (EEG) may be the first reliable biomarkers capable of measuring consciousness over time.

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Charlotte Martial, a neuroscientist in the Coma Science Group at the University of Liège in Belgium, is similarly interested in what we can learn about death from studying moments when people are potentially conscious but largely unresponsive, such as when they are under general anesthesia or experiencing cardiac arrest. These types of experiences, she says, can function as a sort of proxy for studying the moments surrounding death under laboratory conditions, rather than relying on isolated case studies with small numbers of patients. Currently, Martial is probing whether psychedelic experiences can fulfill this role, too, by inducing states similar to near-death experiences that patients can then share details about with scientists.

“Medicine has defined these criteria for brain death, but we don’t yet understand everything about the subjective experience of that,” she says, adding that developing empirical methods for studying something like a near-death experience could help scientists better understand the distinctions between consciousness and responsiveness, and what that means for our clinical concepts of death.

Borjigin’s early discoveries about the potentially altered states in her lab rats’ brains during death continue to inspire her search for understanding. One of her working hypotheses suggests that perhaps the brain takes a more active role in how death progresses than we give it credit for. But furthering her research won’t be easy. Borjigin and others continue to face a scarcity of funding and a lot of misconceptions about the nature and purpose of their research. Death remains a contentious and hard-to-define process.

Still, understanding what happens to each of us in our final moments, crossing the borderlands between life and death, would seem a worthy inquiry. “Even as we’re still trying to wrap our own heads around it,” Borjigin says, “it seems undeniable to me that something worth looking at is going on here.

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Amanda Heidt

Posted on June 16, 2025

Amanda Heidt is an award-winning freelance science journalist and editor covering topics across the life sciences, from ecology and the environment to artificial intelligence and the nitty-grittiest cell and molecular bio.

Math

- When Monsters Came for Mathematics

MATH | VIEW ON WEBSITE

When Monsters Came for Mathematics

Adam Kucharski’s 3 greatest revelations while writing Proof: The Art and Science of Certainty

By Adam Kucharski    June 13, 2025

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My background is in mathematics, which has a reputation for being a solid, sturdy subject. Once something has been proven, it generally stays true forever. But in the course of researching my book, I came to realize that even in mathematics, certainty can be a dangerous thing. In the 19th century, several key mathematical theorems began to unravel. For two millennia, European mathematicians had taken inspiration from the natural world. As a result, they had concluded that certain things were intuitively obvious: Geometric shapes obeyed rules like “the whole is larger than the part” and rates of change followed the smooth motion of a falling object. But when dealing with infinities or abstract dimensions, these assumptions no longer held. By the 1870s, mathematicians had discovered awkward theoretical counterexamples, like a part that was the same size as the whole, and a motion—known as a “nowhere differentiable function”—that was never smooth.

As I dug deeper while writing my book, I found myself wondering whether other cultures had relied so heavily on real-life geometry, inspired by the natural world, when developing their concepts of mathematical truth. China had embraced concepts like negative numbers—an abstract concept that cannot be easily visualised—much earlier than in Europe, because their early texts focused on problems involving fortunes and debt. It turns out that the reliance on geometric intuition had effectively been a Trojan horse for European mathematicians, smuggling flawed assumptions into their work. In the 19th century, some established researchers dismissed the emerging counterexamples as “monsters” and “an outrage against common sense”; they were nuisances to be shunned. But over time, these monsters became unavoidable—and even useful. Modern research now relies on these once-undesirable ideas: Astrophysics requires non-standard geometric rules, while probability theory is built on endlessly unpredictable changes.

TRUTHINESS: Adam Kucharski says that though misinformation is clearly an enormous problem in our current era, not enough attention is given to the equally troublesome matter of excessive doubt about true information. Telling people you can’t believe anything on social media could backfire, he says. Photo courtesy of Adam Kucharski.

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Over the past decade, I’ve spent a lot of time writing about—and in some cases building—AI algorithms. One thing that’s often bugged me is why seemingly advanced AI can occasionally make such basic errors. Take image recognition. Famously, the addition of a faint digital watermark can cause an AI classifier to confuse an image of a panda for a gibbon.

While writing my book, I interviewed Tony Wang, an AI researcher who’d become interested in two specific hypotheses to explain these errors. First, it could be that the algorithms were implicitly mimicking the fast, instinctive mental processing that can also lead humans to a bad snap judgement. This would suggest an algorithm that reflected a bit more on its decisions could avoid such errors. The second possibility was that AI just isn’t good enough yet, and a truly “superhuman” version would outgrow these errors.

Modern research now relies on once-undesirable ideas.

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To test these hypotheses, Wang and his colleagues focused on the complex game of Go, which has been mastered by AI in the past decade. They started by training an “adversarial” algorithm that searched for flaws in top Go-playing AI software. Eventually, they found two absurd strategies that could beat the software—the sorts of strategies that even an amateur human wouldn’t be fooled by. Yet the “superhuman” AI player remained highly confident of victory, right up to the moment it lost.

This suggested that neither hypothesis was correct. Even the reflective AI capable of playing a game as complex as Go wasn’t safe, and seemingly “superhuman” software still fell for ridiculous tricks. No matter how intelligent an AI appears, unexpected weaknesses may be inevitable.

When I began writing Proof, the effect of misinformation—particularly during the worst months of the COVID-19 pandemic—was very much on my mind. In January 2021, rioters were storming the United States Capitol while Covid deniers were harassing medics outside hospitals. Why do so many people believe things that aren’t true?

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Today, much attention is given to misinformation, and the supposed flood of falsehoods online. In response, researchers and policy makers have sought ways to reduce false beliefs. But the more I looked, the more this simple story unravelled. A vocal minority do consume extreme amounts of false information and conspiracy theories online, but the broader picture shows most people still engage far more with trustworthy news sources than dubious ones.

“To doubt everything or to believe everything are two equally convenient solutions.”

This imbalance leads to a problem: If a study only measures belief in false content, an intervention that reduces belief in all information will appear to be successful. Telling people “you can’t trust anything you read on social media” might protect them from lies, but it also may have the pernicious side effect of undermining their trust in the truth.

In the early 20th century, mathematician Henri Poincaré noted that “To doubt everything or to believe everything are two equally convenient solutions.” The dominant focus in recent years has been on the risk of believing too much, but I’ve realised not enough attention has been given to the threat of excessive doubt. We must look at the deeper reasons that people disengage with true information and disregard valid evidence and experts.

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The relationship between truth and trust will become more challenging as science becomes more complex. Poincaré was once described as the “last universalist”; no mathematician since has excelled in all areas of the field as it existed at the time. Put simply, there are now just too many mathematical topics to master. The same is true of other scientific fields. From climate analysis to AI, even experts must heavily specialize. Now, more than ever, science and technology rely on building and maintaining trust—in experts, in institutions, and in machines.

Lead image by Tasnuva Elahi; image by wickerwood / Shutterstock

Adam Kucharski

Posted on June 13, 2025

Adam Kucharski is a professor at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, where he works on analysis of infectious disease outbreaks, work that won him the 2023 Adams Prize for mathematics. He regularly appears in print and broadcast media and is the author of the recently published Proof: The Art and Science of Certainty. He lives in Hertfordshire, U.K.

Microbiology

- The Sublime Smarts of Slime Molds

MICROBIOLOGY | VIEW ON WEBSITE

The Sublime Smarts of Slime Molds

These single-celled blobs show intelligent behavior

By Sarah Gilman    June 23, 2025    Photograph by Andy Sands

Slime molds can be more dazzling in appearance than their name suggests. Like fungi, these difficult-to-classify organisms reproduce with spores, and to release these spores, they grow fruiting bodies in a wide array of shades and textures. Some resemble peacock-iridescent disco balls on stalks; or miniature red, gold, and orange popsicles. Others, like this Badhamia utricularis photographed by Andy Sands, look like tiny tangerines or juniper berries.

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Most are miniscule, at least in the early stages of life. To find them, Sands, a United Kingdom-based photographer, advises budding slime-mold photographers to do as he does: “get a pair of strong reading glasses, a magnifying glass, and a flashlight, and crawl around under holly bushes for hours on end.”

Scholarly manuscripts from ancient China describe one species as “demon droppings.”

Slime molds are protists—a mishmash of eukaryotic organisms that are neither animals, plants, nor fungi. Their spores germinate to form amoeba-like or flagellated cells, which can merge into a zygote, and eventually grow through mitosis into one giant, creeping cell with multiple nuclei, called a plasmodium. Depending on the species, a single plasmodium can cover an area of more than 108 square feet, the size of a small bedroom.

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The many shapes and shades of slime molds—there are more than 900 species worldwide—have led to an equally arresting array of common names. Fuligo septica, for instance, forms a chunky, bright-yellow mass, which Indigenous people of Mexico have called “moon’s excrement.” Scholarly manuscripts from ancient China, meanwhile, describe what is likely the same species as “demon droppings.” Today, it is more widely referred to as “dog-vomit” or “scrambled-egg” slime mold. Other species have earned such charming sobriquets as “wolf’s milk,” “chocolate tube,” and “pretzel.” One Arkansas-based researcher had a friend suggest that the whole cryptic group would be much better described as “sublime molds.”

These remarkable creatures do more than rack up nicknames. They also challenge the conventional scientific wisdom that an organism must have a central nervous system to learn and to show intelligent behaviors. One well-studied species, the yellow Physarum polycephalum, can find the most efficient path to food through a maze. Various researchers have also placed little piles of food on flat maps of Tokyo, Canada, the U.K., and Spain and shown how Physarum navigate between hubs in ways that mirror those regions’ modern transportation networks or follow routes of comparable efficiency.

In another experiment, researchers presented the species with various food mixtures. The Physarum specimens first explored each mixture, then consistently chose the one with the most ideal nutrient balance. In still other experiments, the organism used its own slime paths to remember where it had been. Physarum can also habituate to stimuli, such as a novel chemical, proceeding more cautiously and slowly across a surface where the chemical is present but learning to ignore it over time if repeated encounters lead to no ill effect. A habituated slime mold can even pass on what it has learned to another plasmodium by fusing with it.

Whether these experiments confirm that slime molds are sentient is hard to say. But it does call into question the need to sort all organisms into tidy categories.

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This story originally appeared in bioGraphic, an independent magazine about nature and regeneration powered by the California Academy of Sciences.

A lifelong naturalist, Andy Sands has been photographing wildlife for more than 25 years. His passion is British wildlife, and he particularly enjoys photographing birds in song, the small mammals that we seldom see, as well as insects and other invertebrates, documenting their lifecycles and behavior. Being an experienced field naturalist has enabled him to take intimate portraits of wild animals in natural surroundings. In recent years he has focussed extensively on coverage of fungi and slime molds.

Sarah Gilman

Posted on June 23, 2025

Sarah Gilman is a writer, illustrator, and editor who covers the environment, science, and place from rural Washington state. She’s also a contributing editor at Hakai Magazine. Her work has appeared in The Atlantic, Audubon, Smithsonian, High Country News, National Geographic, and others.

Neuroscience

- The Science of Tripping Comes to Town

- Dude, You Stink

- Finding Peter Putnam

NEUROSCIENCE | VIEW ON WEBSITE

The Science of Tripping Comes to Town

The many challenges of studying psychedelics

By Katherine Harmon Courage    June 24, 2025

Last week, thousands of scientists, practitioners, entrepreneurs, and members of the curious public converged on Denver for the annual Psychedelic Science conference. Neuroscience lectures by scientists from Stanford University and New York University mixed with discussions about clergy on psilocybin, workshops about the use of ecstasy for couples therapy, booths touting sound healing, and a handful of imaginative costumes. I visited for just one day, but still  found it the most colorful—if not the most sequined—scientific conference I’ve covered in my years as a science journalist.

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But it was also among the most fascinating and forward-looking. And dare I say, self-aware?

Serious scientific research on psychedelics has faced a world of challenges from the get-go. Even the early “psychonauts” of the late 18th century tried to grapple with the seeming impossibility of mapping quantitatively the very qualitative experience of such an altered mind state. (In an early investigation of the effects of nitrous oxide, one participant in 1799 told chemist Humphry Davy, “I feel like the sound of a harp.”)

One of the big challenges for rigorous scientific trials of psychedelic drugs—including psilocybin in mushrooms, MDMA, DMT, LSD, and the like—is that study participants rather quickly become aware of whether they have received the drug or a placebo, as Balazs Szigeti, of the University of California, San Francisco Translational Psychedelic Research Program, noted in one scientific session at the conference. Which can confound results much more profoundly than a well-blinded study, where participants are unsure about whether they had a sham treatment or the real thing.

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One option is to unblind the studies—which, as scientific posters at the conference showed, are being conducted to see if psychedelics can treat everything from anxiety to post-partum depression to cocaine addiction to extreme fear of heights. Researchers could even potentially not reveal to participants that there is a separate arm of the study receiving a different treatment, Szigeti and his colleagues suggested.

Another is to use up-and-coming pharmaceutical options known as non-psychedelic analogues that are showing promise of similar impacts on the brain’s plasticity (a large reason why psychedelics are thought to be effective in some treatments), while leaving participants still firmly rooted in their familiar perceptual reality. These are, perhaps unsurprisingly, somewhat controversial in the field.

Still another option for working around some of these challenges is to dive beyond subjective reports and peer into the brain’s activity to look for proxies from fMRIs, EEGs, and PET scans.

But even these, as scientific and mechanistic as they appear, come with their own limitations, including—as one panel of experts noted—how the data is displayed. “Heat maps” of brain activity, for example, can only show where more blood is being channeled and might indicate areas that are becoming more active, whether a person is sober or on a wild psychedelic trip. And many of these images can be misleading, as Lindsay Cameron, a postdoctoral psychiatry researcher at Stanford, pointed out.

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Cameron cited a much-used figure from a paper that shows substantially increased activity connecting different areas of the brain of people on psilocybin—compared with those who were sober. But, she noted, these sorts of increases are not special to psychedelics. “This happens with a lot of caffeine. It happens with meth. It happens with cocaine. Things that increase your brain activity and rev it up—it’s not a totally crazy finding,” she said. “So I want to emphasize: Know what you’re looking at when you look at these images.”

Another good reminder that all may not be as it appears.

Lead image: Bruce Rolff / Shutterstock

Katherine Harmon Courage

Posted on June 24, 2025

Katherine Harmon Courage is the executive editor at Nautilus.

NEUROSCIENCE | VIEW ON WEBSITE

Dude, You Stink

But why?

By Bob Grant    June 20, 2025

Most of us know a stink when we smell one. Yesterday’s fish or last week’s socks can cause us to retch. But other familiar scents can conjure the opposite effect: A distinctive eau de toilette can start us pining for a certain someone. A whiff of fresh-baked cookies can make the stomach growl and remind us of grandma’s house. Bad or good, smells can leave indelible marks on our memories that linger far longer than the odors. But science has understood surprisingly little about how brains attach meaning and emotion to particular aromas.

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Now, a team of scientists led by researchers at the University of Florida’s Chemical Senses Institute has revealed some of the key neural connections made when the brain perceives a smell, decides if it’s good or bad, and then attaches an emotional response to the odor. The findings recently appeared online in Molecular Psychiatry.

Working in mice, the researchers zeroed in on the amygdala, a brain region long known to regulate emotional responses to sensory stimuli. By exposing mice to odors, observing their behavior, and monitoring brain activity, the team identified novel neuron types that categorize smells as either pleasant or unpleasant. The newly described brain cells extend from the amygdala into the ventral striatum—the region of the brain most closely associated with reward—where they excite other neurons, influencing learned and off-the-cuff emotional states.

According to the unbelievably aptly named Sarah Sniffen, first author on the paper and University of Florida Ph.D. student, the significance of the research extends beyond the quotidian experience of encountering and reacting to smells. “I hope this work provides insight into how altered sensory-emotional processing might contribute to neuropsychiatric conditions like depression, anxiety, or PTSD,” she said in a statement. “We’re constantly breathing in and out and that means that we’re constantly receiving olfactory input … For people who have a heightened response to sensory stimuli, like those with PTSD or anxiety or autism, it’s a really important factor for their day-to-day life.”

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Lead image: Lightspring / Shutterstock

Bob Grant

Posted on June 20, 2025

Bob Grant is the deputy editor at Nautilus.

NEUROSCIENCE | VIEW ON WEBSITE

Finding Peter Putnam

The forgotten janitor who discovered the logic of the mind

By Amanda Gefter    June 17, 2025    Illustration by Cornelia Li

The neighborhood was quiet. There was a chill in the air. The scent of Spanish moss hung from the cypress trees. Plumes of white smoke rose from the burning cane fields and stretched across the skies of Terrebonne Parish. The man swung a long leg over a bicycle frame and pedaled off down the street.

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It was 1987 in Houma, Louisiana, and he was headed to the Department of Transportation, where he was working the night shift, sweeping floors and cleaning toilets. He was just picking up speed when a car came barreling toward him with a drunken swerve.

A screech shot down the corridor of East Main Street, echoed through the vacant lots, and rang out over the Bayou.

Then silence.

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The 60-year-old man lying on the street, as far as anyone knew, was just a janitor hit by a drunk driver. There was no mention of it on the local news, no obituary in the morning paper. His name might have been Anonymous. But it wasn’t.

How could this genius just vanish into obscurity?

His name was Peter Putnam. He was a physicist who’d hung out with Albert Einstein, John Archibald Wheeler, and Niels Bohr, and two blocks from the crash, in his run-down apartment, where his partner, Claude, was startled by a screech, were thousands of typed pages containing a groundbreaking new theory of the mind.

“Only two or three times in my life have I met thinkers with insights so far reaching, a breadth of vision so great, and a mind so keen as Putnam’s,” Wheeler said in 1991. And Wheeler, who coined the terms “black hole” and “wormhole,” had worked alongside some of the greatest minds in science.

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Robert Works Fuller, a physicist and former president of Oberlin College, who worked closely with Putnam in the 1960s, told me in 2012, “Putnam really should be regarded as one of the great philosophers of the 20th century. Yet he’s completely unknown.”

That word—unknown—it came to haunt me as I spent the next 12 years trying to find out why.

The American Philosophical Society Library in Philadelphia, with its marbled floors and chandeliered ceilings, is home to millions of rare books and manuscripts, including John Wheeler’s notebooks. I was there in 2012, fresh off writing a physics book that had left me with nagging questions about the strange relationship between observer and observed. Physics seemed to suggest that observers play some role in the nature of reality, yet who or what an observer is remained a stubborn mystery.

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Wheeler, who made key contributions to nuclear physics, general relativity, and quantum gravity, had thought more about the observer’s role in the universe than anyone—if there was a clue to that mystery anywhere, I was convinced it was somewhere in his papers. That’s when I turned over a mylar overhead, the kind people used to lay on projectors, with the titles of two talks, as if given back-to-back at the same unnamed event:

Wheeler: From Reality to Consciousness

Putnam: From Consciousness to Reality

Putnam, it seemed, had been one of Wheeler’s students, whose opinion Wheeler held in exceptionally high regard. That was odd, because Wheeler’s students were known for becoming physics superstars, earning fame, prestige, and Nobel Prizes: Richard Feynman, Hugh Everett, and Kip Thorne.

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Back home, a Google search yielded images of a very muscly, very orange man wearing a very small speedo. This, it turned out, was the wrong Peter Putnam. Eventually, I stumbled on a 1991 article in the Princeton Alumni Weekly newsletter called “Brilliant Enigma.” “Except for the barest outline,” the article read, “Putnam’s life is ‘veiled,’ in the words of Putnam’s lifelong friend and mentor, John Archibald Wheeler.”

THE SCHOLAR: Peter Putnam catches up with the news while studying at the University of Leiden in 1956. Putnam spent a semester in the Netherlands working as an assistant to physicist John Archibald Wheeler. Credit: John Archibald Wheeler, courtesy of Alison Lahnston.

A quick search of old newspaper archives turned up an intriguing article from the Associated Press, published six years after Putnam’s death. “Peter Putnam lived in a remote bayou town in Louisiana, worked as a night watchman on a swing bridge [and] wrote philosophical essays,” the article said. “He also tripled the family fortune to about $40 million by investing successfully in risky stock ventures.”

The questions kept piling up. Forty million dollars?

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I searched a while longer for any more information but came up empty-handed. But I couldn’t forget about Peter Putnam. His name played like a song stuck in my head. I decided to track down anyone who might have known him.

The only paper Putnam ever published was co-authored with Robert Fuller, so I flew from my home in Cambridge, Massachusetts, to Berkeley, California, to meet him. Fuller was nearing 80 years old but had an imposing presence and a booming voice. He sat across from me in his sun-drenched living room, seeming thrilled to talk about Putnam yet plagued by some palpable regret.

Putnam had developed a theory of the brain that “ranged over the whole of philosophy, from ethics to methodology to mathematical foundations to metaphysics,” Fuller told me.  He compared Putnam’s work to Alan Turing’s and Kurt Gödel’s. “Turing, Gödel, and Putnam—they’re three peas in a pod,” Fuller said. “But one of them isn’t recognized.”

Fuller led me to Barry Spinello, a filmmaker in Bakersfield, California, who met Putnam at the Apollo Theater in Harlem in 1963. Cannonball Adderley was wailing on the sax. “I turned around and saw this guy doing a ridiculous dance,” Spinello said—half jive, half seizure. Putnam was tall and thin like an overgrown twig, flailing like he might tie himself into a knot. They got to talking, and Spinello found Putnam so fascinating that, 10 years later, he traveled to Louisiana to record a week’s worth of conversations about his work.

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For nights on end, on a cot in Spinello’s studio, I slept to the clicks and hums of an achy reel-to-reel machine, as it fed 35 hours of audio into my digital recorder. I listened to one of the recordings in my headphones on the plane ride back, flinching when Putnam’s voice broke through the static. Suddenly he became a real person, a person with vocal cords. He sounded like Jimmy Stewart with a stutter. “Sometimes I think it would’ve worked with Wheeler,” he was saying, “but it just …” Then he went silent.

Spinello gave me an email address for Coleman Clarke, who had met Putnam in New York City in the 1960s while Clarke was doing his Ph.D. at Columbia University. “It’s mind blowing to me that you found Putnam in Wheeler’s journals,” Clarke wrote in reply, as if I’d won a scavenger hunt that everyone else had quit playing decades ago.

Illustration by Cornelia Li

Clarke seemed relieved that someone had finally come around asking about Putnam, eager to tell me about this extraordinary man who had slipped through the cracks of history. “He was a genius,” Clarke said. “Every talk with him had this level of significance that was just orders of magnitude higher up than a normal conversation with a normal human being.”

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One person led to another. Gary Aston-Jones, head of the Brain Health Institute at Rutgers University, told me he was inspired by Putnam to go into neuroscience after Clarke gave him one of Putnam’s papers.

“Putnam’s nervous system model presaged by decades stuff that’s very cutting edge in neuroscience,” Aston-Jones said, and yet, “in the field of neuroscience, I don’t know anybody that’s ever heard of him.”

Phillips Jones, a physicist who worked alongside Putnam in the early 1960s, told me over the phone, “We got the sense that what Einstein’s general theory was for physics, Peter’s model would be for the mind.”

Even Einstein himself was impressed with Putnam. At 19 years old, Putnam went to Einstein’s house to talk with him about Arthur Stanley Eddington, the British astrophysicist. (Eddington performed the key experiment that proved Einstein’s theory of gravity.) Putnam was obsessed with an allegory by Eddington about a fisherman and wanted to ask Einstein about it. Putnam also wanted Einstein to give a speech promoting world government to a political group he’d organized. Einstein—who was asked by plenty of people to do plenty of things—thought highly enough of Putnam to agree.

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How could this genius, this Einstein of the mind, just vanish into obscurity? When I asked why, if Putnam was so important, no one has ever heard of him, everyone gave me the same answer: because he didn’t publish his work, and even if he had, no one would have understood it.

“He spoke and wrote in ‘Putnamese,’ ” Fuller said. “If you can find his papers, I think you’ll immediately see what I mean.”

In a January freeze in 2013, I headed to Rochester, New York, to meet Clarke. He was in his late 70s but looked younger—tall and slim with gray hair and a bounce in his step. “I’m just so excited that you’ve found Putnam,” he said warmly. It sounded like, what took you so long? He told me he had some of Putnam’s papers in storage.

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We drove to a nondescript brick building. I followed him down a cold, white hallway until he stopped in front of one of the units. He turned the key and lifted the massive door.

You have to understand what I was expecting. I thought we were going to his storage unit, that it would be filled with whatever storage units are filled with—old clothes and rusty bikes, mismatched chairs and unused exercise equipment. Then somewhere, beneath a pile of something, in a dusty cardboard box, a few of Putnam’s papers.

That’s not what this was.

As the door rolled up, I caught a glimpse of what lay behind.

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“This is all Putnam?” I whispered.

Clarke nodded. “I’ve never shown anyone before you.”

Putnam’s remarkable claim was that simply by playing this game, the system will learn.

There were no old clothes. No mismatched chairs. Only filing cabinets. Rows of filing cabinets, all neatly labeled, giving the whole place the appearance of a professional archive. I looked around, stunned. It was the entire library of Putnam’s unpublished writings. His theory, his life. The whole long-lost thing.

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When Clarke first heard that Putnam had been killed, he made frantic phone calls to the Putnam family lawyer to find out what was happening with Peter’s papers. The answer seemed to be nothing—they’d been moved from Houma to a Cleveland warehouse and might have been thrown away. Clarke rushed to Ohio, loaded them onto a truck, and drove them to his home in Utah for safe keeping; when he moved to Rochester, the archive moved with him.

Now he dug through drawers, handing me papers and folders until I was holding a stack so large I nearly toppled over. Typed manuscripts at hundreds of pages apiece; binders full of notes and letters; handwritten journals; accordion folders bursting with photos, telegrams, and postcards—we piled as much as we could into the trunk of my rental car and I drove back to my hotel.

It’s one thing to read through curated papers at a place like the American Philosophical Society, with pages gingerly propped on foam wedges under the watchful eyes of librarians. It’s another to flop down on a white bedspread in a Courtyard Marriott and hold a man’s unprocessed life, alone. You turn it over in your hands, still covered in his pencil marks, smudged with his fingerprints; an envelope singed in the spiral shape of his stove ring, yellowed glue clutching his pet bird’s tattered feather, a letter torn apart seemingly in anger and taped back together in remorse. Suddenly you’re implicated. You’ve disturbed a sleeping thing.

Skimming through the papers I saw that the people I’d spoken to hadn’t been kidding about the Putnamese. “To bring the felt under mathematical categories involves building a type of mathematical framework within which latent colliding heuristics can be exhibited as of a common goal function,” I read, before dropping the paper with a sigh. Each one went on like that for hundreds of pages at a time, on none of which did he apparently bother to stop and explain what the whole thing was really about.

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There was no way I could read it all in a reasonable amount of time, so I spent the next week driving between my hotel and the storage unit. I’d stay up all night, photographing the items page by page, then head back to the storage unit, bleary-eyed in the daylight, to swap it all out for a new batch. I’d already photographed some 10,000 pages of material when Clarke grinned and confessed, “There’s a second storage unit.”

PARTNERS: John “Claude” DeBrew and Peter Putnam in Houma, Louisiana, circa 1978. Putnam met Debrew, an ex-Army major, in a Harlem jazz club. They lived together for 17 years before Putnam died. Courtesy of Coleman Clarke.

Back in my apartment in Cambridge, I began sorting through everything I’d found. Photographs, letters, transcripts, papers—I spread them on the kitchen table like pieces to a jigsaw puzzle. Gradually, Putnam’s life and the scope of his theory came into view.

He developed it over the course of three decades, starting as a teenager in the 1940s. He wrote constantly—in the Navy, when he was sent to the brig for reading poetry on duty; while earning his degrees at Princeton University, and after, teaching physics at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst in the 1950s and Columbia University in New York in the 1960s. He wrote while he was living in Fuller’s office at Barnard College with little more than a cot, a phonograph, and a hot plate, and when he moved into a basement apartment in upper Manhattan, just west of Harlem, his lanky form hunched over a typewriter between the grated window bars.

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Putnam spent most of his time alone, Fuller had told me. “Because of this isolation, he developed a way of expressing himself in which he uses words, phrases, concepts, in weird ways, peculiar to himself. The thing would be totally incomprehensible to anyone.”

I took the incomprehensibility as a test. I didn’t know why I was being tested. I only knew I wanted to pass. I was driven in part by the looks on everyone’s faces, a pain that appeared fresh despite the years. “My basic upset is, I feel somehow I failed to get his stuff out there,” Fuller said. Wheeler had felt the same. “I realize I didn’t do my duty by Peter,” he said after Putnam died.

Their regret was now my inheritance, a whisper that grew louder as the years pressed on. I might have walked away if I hadn’t been struck with the same feeling that had taken hold of everyone else: that Putnam was actually onto something. That he was quite possibly a genius. In the beginning, I was chasing Peter Putnam the fantasy, a forgotten janitor who’d discovered the structure of the mind. But the deeper I read, I found myself thinking, Wait, did a forgotten janitor seriously discover the structure of the mind?

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Imagine a fisherman who’s exploring the life of the ocean. He casts his net into the water, scoops up a bunch of fish, inspects his catch and shouts, “A-ha! I have made two great scientific discoveries. First, there are no fish smaller than two inches. Second, all fish have gills.”

The fisherman’s first “discovery” is clearly an error. It’s not that there are no fish smaller than two inches, it’s that the holes in his net are two inches in diameter. But the second discovery seems to be genuine—a fact about the fish, not the net.

This was the Eddington allegory that obsessed Putnam.

When physicists study the world, how can they tell which of their findings are features of the world and which are features of their net? How do we, as observers, disentangle the subjective aspects of our minds from the objective facts of the universe? Eddington suspected that one couldn’t know anything about the fish until one knew the structure of the net.

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That’s what Putnam set out to do: come up with a description of the net, a model of “the structure of thought,” as he put it in a 1948 diary entry.

At the time, scientists were abuzz with a new way of thinking about thinking. Alan Turing had worked out an abstract model of computation, which quickly led not only to the invention of physical computers but also to the idea that perhaps the brain, too, was a kind of Turing machine.

Putnam disagreed. “Man is a species of computer of fundamentally different genus than those she builds,” he wrote. It was a radical claim (not only for the mixed genders): He wasn’t saying that the mind isn’t a computer, he was saying it was an entirely different kind of computer.

A universal Turing machine is a powerful thing, capable of computing anything that can be computed by an algorithm. But Putnam saw that it had its limitations. A Turing machine, by design, performs deductive logic—logic where the answers to a problem are contained in its premises, where the rules of inference are pregiven, and information is never created, only shuffled around. Induction, on the other hand, is the process by which we come up with the premises and rules in the first place. “Could there be some indirect way to model or orient the induction process, as we do deductions?” Putnam asked.

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Whenever Putnam made a new friend, his mother warned him, “They’re probably using you for your money.”

Putnam laid out the dynamics of what he called a universal “general purpose heuristic”—which we might call an “induction machine,” or more to the point, a mind—borrowing from the mathematics of game theory, which was thick in the air at Princeton. His induction “game” was simple enough. He imagined a system (immersed in an environment) that could make one mutually exclusive “move” at a time. The system is composed of a massive number of units, each of which can switch between one of two states. They all act in parallel, switching, say, “on” and “off” in response to one another. Putnam imagined that these binary units could condition one another’s behavior, so if one caused another to turn on (or off) in the past, it would become more likely to do so in the future. To play the game, the rule is this: The first chain of binary units, linked together by conditioned reflexes, to form a self-reinforcing loop emits a move on behalf of the system.

Every game needs a goal. In a Turing machine, goals are imposed from the outside. For true induction, the process itself should create its own goals. And there was a key constraint: Putnam realized that the dynamics he had in mind would only work mathematically if the system had just one goal governing all its behavior.

That’s when it hit him: The goal is to repeat. Repetition isn’t a goal that has to be programmed in from the outside; it’s baked into the very nature of things—to exist from one moment to the next is to repeat your existence. “This goal function,” Putnam wrote, “appears pre-encoded in the nature of being itself.”

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So, here’s the game. The system starts out in a random mix of “on” and “off” states. Its goal is to repeat that state—to stay the same. But in each turn, a perturbation from the environment moves through the system, flipping states, and the system has to emit the right sequence of moves (by forming the right self-reinforcing loops) to alter the environment in such a way that it will perturb the system back to its original state.

Putnam’s remarkable claim was that simply by playing this game, the system will learn; its sequences of moves will become increasingly less random. It will create rules for how to behave in a given situation, then automatically root out logical contradictions among those rules, resolving them into better ones. And here’s the weird thing: It’s a game that can never be won. The system never exactly repeats. But in trying to, it does something better. It adapts. It innovates. It performs induction.

HAPPY DAYS: Peter Putnam in his Navy uniform shares a laugh with his mother, Mildred Andrews Putnam, at their home on Lake Shore Boulevard in the affluent village of Bratenahl, Ohio, circa 1944. Courtesy of Coleman Clarke.

In paper after paper, Putnam attempted to show how his induction game plays out in the human brain, with motor behaviors serving as the mutually exclusive “moves” and neurons as the parallel binary units that link up into loops to move the body. The point wasn’t to give a realistic picture of how a messy, anatomical brain works any more than an abstract Turing machine describes the workings of an iMac. It was not a biochemical description, but a logical one—a “brain calculus,” Putnam called it.

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As the game is played, perturbations from outside—photons hitting the retina, hunger signals rising from the gut—require the brain to emit the right sequence of movements to return to its prior state. At first it has no idea what to do—each disturbance is a neural impulse moving through the brain in search of a pathway out, and it will take the first loop it can find. That’s why a newborn’s movements start out as random thrashes. But when those movements don’t satisfy the goal, the disturbance builds and spreads through the brain, feeling for new pathways, trying loop after loop, thrash after thrash, until it hits on one that does the trick.

When a successful move, discovered by sheer accident, quiets a perturbation, it gets wired into the brain as a behavioral rule. Once formed, applying the rule is a matter of deduction: The brain outputs the right move without having to try all the wrong ones first.

But the real magic happens when a contradiction arises, when two previously successful rules, called up in parallel, compete to move the body in mutually exclusive ways. A hungry baby, needing to find its mother’s breast, simultaneously fires up two loops, conditioned in from its history: “when hungry, turn to the left” and “when hungry, turn to the right.” Deductive logic grinds to a halt; the facilitation of either loop, neurally speaking, inhibits the other. Their horns lock. The neural activity has no viable pathway out. The brain can’t follow through with a wired-in plan—it has to create a new one.

How? By bringing in new variables that reshape the original loops into a new pathway, one that doesn’t negate either of the original rules, but clarifies which to use when. As the baby grows hungrier, activity spreads through the brain, searching its history for anything that can break the tie. If it can’t find it in the brain, it will automatically search the environment, thrash by thrash. The mathematics of game theory, Putnam said, guarantee that, since the original rules were in service of one and the same goal, an answer, logically speaking, can always be found.

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“Perhaps I have actually found a place in the world that wants me at last—as I am.”

In this case, the baby’s brain finds a key variable: When “turn left” worked, the neural signal created by the warmth of the mother’s breast against the baby’s left cheek got wired in with the behavior. When “turn right” worked, the right cheek was warm. That extra bit of sensory signal is enough to tip the scales. The brain has forged a new loop, a more general rule: “When hungry, turn in the direction of the warmer cheek.”

New universals lead to new motor sequences, which allow new interactions with the world, which dredge up new contradictions, which force new resolutions, and so on up the ladder of ever-more intelligent behavior. “This constitutes a theory of the induction process,” Putnam wrote.

In notebooks, in secret, using language only he would understand, Putnam mapped out the dynamics of a system that could perceive, learn, think, and create ideas through induction—a computer that could program itself, then find contradictions among its programs and wrangle them into better programs, building itself out of its history of interactions with the world. Just as Turing had worked out an abstract, universal model of the very possibility of computation, Putnam worked out an abstract, universal model of the very possibility of mind. It was a model, he wrote, that “presents a basic overall pattern [or] character of thought in causal terms for the first time.”

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Putnam had said you can’t understand another person until you know what fight they’re in, what contradiction they’re working through. I saw before me two stories, equally true: Putnam was a genius who worked out a new logic of the mind. And Putnam was a janitor who died unknown. The only way to resolve a contradiction, he said, is to find the auxiliary variables that forge a pathway to a larger story, one that includes and clarifies both truths. The variables for this contradiction? Putnam’s mother and money.

Putnam grew up with money. He was born in 1927 in Ohio, to John B. Putnam, Sr., charming corporate lawyer, and Mildred Andrews Putnam, fearsome lady-who-lunched. They lived in the village of Bratenahl, a tiny neighborhood outside Cleveland, home to the ultra-rich, in a big, white Victorian house with a round cone-topped turret and the expanse of Lake Erie unfurling from their backyard. Whenever Putnam made a new friend, his mother warned him, “They’re probably using you for your money.”

When Putnam and his older brother, Johnny, were little, their parents told them a story about a boy named Ikey. Ikey’s father had lifted Ikey up and sat him high up on the mantle above the fireplace. Then the father told him, “OK, Ikey. Jump!”

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“He is afraid,” Putnam wrote, “but told his daddy will catch him. He is afraid, but told to have faith, and all will go well.” So Ikey jumps. But his father doesn’t catch him. He steps to the side, lets the kid fall. “When Ikey cries and complains,” Putnam wrote, “he is told never to trust anyone, not even his mother and father.”

That was the moral of the story that Mildred and John Putnam told to their children. Never trust anyone. Not even us. Johnny cried, but Peter just soaked it in.

TWO FRIENDS: Oval with Points by sculptor Henry Moore, donated by Peter Putnam, on the Princeton University campus. Putnam’s mentor and champion, John Archibald Wheeler, described the work as a “place for two friends to sit side by side.” Photo by Justin Smith.

At 16, Putnam joined the Navy, and it was there, in radar school, that he realized his aptitude for physics. At the same time, he realized his desperation to unravel the mystery of minds. He needed to understand the secret motives his mother warned about, especially now that he was coming to grips with his homosexuality, which left him feeling helplessly set apart.

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In 1944, Putnam received word that his brother, a fighter pilot in the Air Force, had been killed overseas. Peter’s diary entry that day read: “Tuesday—Johnny isn’t.” Johnny had been the Putnam’s golden boy: blond-haired, blue-eyed, confident, athletic. Now there was just Peter: bookish, skinny, painfully shy. The taller of the two, he cultivated a slouch, as if embarrassed by his continued existence. Two years later, still reeling from Johnny’s death, he used his Navy credits to enroll as a physics major at Princeton.

Wheeler took him under his wing, bringing him to Copenhagen to meet Niels Bohr, raving to Bohr about Putnam’s “very great interest in the philosophical aspects of physics.”

After graduation from Princeton, Putnam reluctantly enrolled in Yale Law School. Now that he was the only son, he was expected to become a lawyer like his father and grandfather. Two years later, his father was diagnosed with late-stage leukemia. As he was dying, he told Peter to forget law and use his inheritance to return to his real work. So Peter joined the philosophy department at Harvard University, planning to do a Ph.D. on Eddington. But when his father died in 1951, Mildred, wanting to retain control over the only family she had left, withheld the money. Peter’s decisions would go through her. Peter, determined to make his own money, dropped out of school and took a job at Sanders and Associates, an electronics company in New Hampshire.

From his salary alone, he saved up enough money to quit and return to Princeton to study with Wheeler for his Ph.D. He promptly informed Mildred that he would not accept another dime from her, ever. “I shall not need, and will not accept, any more money from you from here on,” he wrote in a letter.

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Cut off from the family money, real friendships suddenly seemed possible. “What a funny delightful sensation it is to be asking for the cheapest rooms, and trying to save money,” he wrote in his diary in 1957. “It makes me smile and smile—as though I had a secret. I can feel the friends I have getting wind of it, and speculating—and the nicest part—is that it makes me feel one of them.” He signed the entry, “Self-righteous Peter.”

One of those friends was Fuller. They were walking across campus when Fuller casually asked what Putnam was working on. Putnam turned to him and asked, “Do you really want to know?”

He’d never told anyone about his theory, but with money no longer blocking the way, it all came spilling out. “We talked and talked till I was bleary-eyed and dead tired and had to quit,” Fuller said.

He built walls around his work, walls made of words, but he built them too high—they kept everyone out.

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Putnam dressed in shabby clothes. He sold the Cadillac convertible Mildred had bought him, used the money to buy a bicycle, and gave the remainder of the proceeds to Princeton. He also gave them all the stock he’d earned at Sanders—some 600 shares, valued around $9,000, which he’d asked for in lieu of raises—on the condition that they wouldn’t sell them until he gave the green light. He did, a decade later, and they sold for more than $1 million.

Putnam asked that the donations be used to buy great works of modern sculpture to be displayed around campus. Clarke told me Putnam’s love of abstract sculpture came from “his thinking about the brain and the centrality of motor pathways”—the sculptural form resolving an artist’s own contradictions, then inviting the viewer to move, to think, in new ways. The collection was to be a memorial to his brother. The donor was to be listed as “Anonymous.”

After a stint teaching physics in Amherst, Putnam followed Fuller to New York City in 1963. Fuller was teaching at Columbia, so Putnam taught a summer seminar in the physics department. His lectures were so heavily laced with philosophy that students from the Union Theological Seminary across the street began showing up. After class they’d go to a nearby café, quoting lines of Putnamese. “Jazz is the mathematization of the soul.” “We know things in the act, not in their essence.” The Seminary hired Putnam, and set him up in the basement apartment on Claremont Ave.

In the day, Putnam taught and wrote; at night he’d walk uptown to Harlem to dance at the jazz clubs, a neural free-for-all to enact his improvisational mind. Most of the time, he was the only white guy there. One night he met a Black ex-Army Major named John DeBrew, who went by the nickname Claude. “Claude sneaked under my defenses as a bird or flower does,” Putnam wrote. “I’ve been most lucky in finding a gentle, affectionate person.” He was open about the relationship with everyone, noting in a letter to Fuller that, when it came to his sexuality, “We should be able to discuss anything, and treat it as we should a problem in mathematics.”

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One of Putnam’s students, Kim Hopper, now a medical anthropologist at Columbia, told me that Putnam wrote an article for the Union Seminary Quarterly Review, where he mentioned, in an offhanded way, the “depth and sensitivity of the homosexual community, in which I have been privileged to participate.” “This was at a time when nobody came out,” Hopper said, “especially not in a theological journal!”

“Perhaps I have actually found a place in the world that wants me at last—as I am,” Putnam wrote to his mother. “In any case I am very pleased.”

Mildred was less pleased. She offered Claude $35,000 to leave Peter. Claude didn’t take the bribe, a move that endeared him to Peter for the rest of their lives. Still, Mildred sent a note to Peter, scribbling: “Remember Ikey.”

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Back in Princeton, Wheeler was coming around to the idea that the observer might be implicated in quantum mechanics, and he knew his best bet for understanding the observer was Putnam. He was hoping that Putnam would return to Princeton so they could work together, uniting a theory of the observer with a theory of the observed. Putnam wanted nothing more. “So many people dream of convincing father images of the value of their work,” he replied.

When Mildred realized what was happening, she jumped in, trying to ensure that Peter would get the job and that he’d owe it all to her. She began dangling donations, offering to build a new physics building at Princeton with Wheeler’s name on it. Wheeler wanted no part of it, but Mildred was a force of nature, a hurricane in pearls. “Hopefully something constructive could be arranged over luncheon,” she wrote to Wheeler, adding that she wanted to keep the arrangement between themselves. “Will you please forget I ever wrote this letter and throw it into the fire, as Peter would never forgive me.”

Putnam pleaded with her to stay out of his relationship with Wheeler, but she continued to allude to secret meetings and quid pro quo donations until he didn’t know who or what to believe.

Unable to trust that Wheeler’s interest was pure, Putnam refused to consider a position at Princeton, or a fellowship at the nearby Institute for Advanced Study. He stuck with teaching at the Seminary.

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It’s clear from Wheeler’s journals his interest in Putnam’s work was genuine and deep. Over and over, he read the few papers that Putnam gave him, writing out notes and questions line by line. “He would throw up his hands in despair,” Wheeler’s daughter, Alison Lahnston, told me, “but he kept at it.”

One morning in 1974, over breakfast in Manhattan, Wheeler took 12 pages of notes as Putnam talked about his work, then submitted a book proposal to W.H. Freeman & Company on Putnam’s behalf. The publishers bit, and were ready to draw up a contract, but Putnam again worried that his mother was behind the offer, and refused to sign.

Just then, a perfect opportunity arose to present Putnam to the public. Wheeler was invited by the Neurosciences Research Program at MIT to speak at their March 1975 meeting on “reality and consciousness.” He insisted he could only do it as half of a pair. From Reality to Consciousness. From Consciousness to Reality.

As the meeting approached, Putnam grew nervous. He demanded to know whether Mildred had been involved behind the scenes. Wheeler assured him that she wasn’t, that the talks were solely his idea. Together, they boarded a plane to Boston.

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I listened to the meeting, recorded on a reel-to-reel, stowed away in the archives at MIT. Here, finally, was Putnam’s chance to explain his ideas to the top neuroscientists of the time. I pressed the headphones tight against my ears.

ONE OF THE GREATS: Peter Putnam (far left) holding Robert Fuller’s baby Karen alongside Fuller’s former wife, Ann Lackritz Fuller and friend Thomas Purvis in Amherst, Massachusetts, circa 1961. Fuller, who collaborated with Putnam for 10 years, called Putnam “one of the great philosophers of the 20th century.”  Photo by Robert Fuller.

Wheeler had just finished speaking about the observer in quantum mechanics and introduced Putnam with a warning. “Some terms Peter uses, one needs a glossary to translate.” Wheeler placed a transparency on the projector—he’d made an actual glossary of Putnam’s terms. The crowd burst into laughter. I didn’t have to see Putnam’s face to feel it growing hot. When he began to speak, he stuttered.

“You only perceive signals that are useful for shaping behavior … A game is a special kind of mathematics … But for a game you need a goal function … We’re suggesting that the category repetition is a candidate … You’re searching for rules of choice that allow a repeating or self-reproducing path … There’s a transcendental core to the laws of physics themselves …”

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The crowd grew restless. Wheeler’s talk had gone long, and there wasn’t time for Putnam to finish. The neuroscientists headed out for lunch and the tape cut out.

Things went from bad to worse. Back in New York, Putnam learned he’d lost his job at Union. The President cited “budgetary concerns,” which Putnam took as a veiled attempt to ask for a donation, suspecting that his mother had suggested as much to the administration behind his back.

Wheeler made one last ditch effort to convince Putnam not to give up on academia. I found a handwritten note he wrote in 1975. Not a note, exactly—more like an affidavit.

“I find it utterly impossible to believe that your mother directly or indirectly made any contributions to, or in any way influenced, the action of the Institute for Advanced Study, MIT Neurophysiology, [or] Freeman and Company … I have never been and do not intend to be a party to any arrangement in which relations between you and me, or between you and any institutional setting in which I have any say or knowledge, are dependent in any way whatsoever on any contribution, or any expectation of any contribution, from your mother. There is no lawyer-like or other reservations or loophole in the intent and content of this freely given assurance.”

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But even Wheeler couldn’t penetrate Putnam’s defenses. Never trust anyone. It was a rule of behavior that had dug a trench in his neural circuitry, formed a universal, self-reinforcing loop, and no matter how many alternatives competed with it in parallel, it was always strengthened. It always won. He couldn’t risk having people take a cursory interest in his work just to flatter him, to court him for his money. To weed out anyone who wasn’t in it for the right reasons, he refused to provide an easy summary. It was total commitment or nothing at all. So he built walls around his work, walls made of words, but he built them too high—they kept everyone out, and kept Putnam in.

In June 1975, Putnam sat down and wrote a letter to Wheeler:

“It should be obvious that what I’m doing is a lot of nonsense. I didn’t convince any of the big boys at the conference—didn’t even get any excited about any of the points or themes … Clearly all I’ve been doing is hoodwinking a few naive though often top students—after ten years of teaching my crazy course … finally, the right thing has been done.”

Putnam placed his books on a table at Union Seminary for the taking, dumped stacks of manuscripts in the trash, gave his records and turntable to a janitor. Then he opened to a fresh page in his journal and scrawled, “For myself, given my weaknesses, this is the end. I can’t try any more … At least I’ve finished things off. It fits well enough—for a start for someone else … The best I can do—like Rimbaud—is to vanish.”

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An oil town built on the swamplands between the Mississippi River and the Gulf of Mexico, Houma, Louisiana, is about an hour’s drive southwest from New Orleans. In 1975, Putnam had signed himself and Claude up for VISTA—Volunteers in Service to America, the domestic branch of the Peace Corps—and VISTA sent them to Houma. They were promised government housing, but when the building manager saw that Claude was Black, their apartment suddenly became unavailable. They tried another housing project. Same story. Finally, they went to Senator Circle, the Black project on the other side of town, but they weren’t welcome there either. Interracial and gay—there was no housing project for that. So Putnam found them a spot in a trailer park. The landlady said she’d pray for them.

They reported for VISTA duties at the Wayout Clinic, a nonprofit serving the Black community in Terrebonne Parish. The city had scraped together funds to open a new rec center and they’d asked Wayout to run it. Putnam asked the program director why they couldn’t just give the money directly to the Black community and let them run their own rec center instead of having a bunch of white people in charge. The director told Putnam that it was impossible, that there were legal complexities he wouldn’t understand; it would have to go through a nonprofit, it was very complicated. Putnam didn’t mention that he was a physicist or that he’d studied at Yale Law. He just turned around and registered a new nonprofit, the Terrebonne Improvement Association (TIA). He put together an all-Black Board of Directors, then applied for VISTA volunteers of their own.

The TIA published their own community newsletter, featuring pieces by local Black writers alongside transcripts of speeches by national civil rights leaders. Claude delivered speeches to the TIA, co-written with Putnam behind the scenes. Putnam thought it was important that the community know all the legal tricks the white CEOs and politicians used to keep them down, so Claude spoke about reapportionment and gerrymandering; he urged them to vote in local elections, to make their voices heard on school boards and in town halls. The TIA got two Black representatives elected to the Police Jury. They made plans to fight for better services in minority neighborhoods, for their cut of revenue sharing, for affirmative action all the way up the ladder.

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Illustration by Cornelia Li

Putnam continued to keep his wealth a secret. Mildred had released the inheritance from his father to him in 1972. Putnam put all the money into a charitable trust and named it the Mildred Andrews Fund so that it wouldn’t bear his name. He again stipulated the money should be used to fund public sculpture, this time in New York City and Cleveland, Ohio. The artworks, he wrote, “shall be so placed as to benefit especially our underprivileged (ghetto) areas and so chosen as to express their life and outlook.” By the mid ’80s, Putnam, through stock investments, had grown the fund to $40 million. “Peter was the most skilled master of finance” he’d ever known, commented the family lawyer. Putnam never touched a penny for himself.

To make ends meet, he took odd jobs repairing radios and shucking oysters. He bought a place where Claude and he could live permanently—a small, one-bedroom apartment with a tiny kitchen and wood paneling on the walls. It was on the main road, next to a vacant lot, but the back door opened out onto the bayou, where they could sit and watch the shrimp boats go by and the moonlight ripple on slow, dark water. “Life is a simple thing,” Claude told Peter. “I want to live my life so people associated with me are happy.”

Eventually Putnam landed a gig as a night watchman and janitor for the Department of Transportation. “It’s clearly the best job I’ve ever had,” he told Spinello on the recordings. “I needed to get other kinds of roots in the community. I think that this position is in some sense symbolically right. Whereas my position as a teacher, you know, symbolically stunk.”

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The emotion welled up in his voice. “I mean, how could I get in direct relationship to people?” he stuttered. “When there’s a big hunk of money … Even my own prof, who I loved, who I did my thesis under … My mother denied it was going on. She would talk dramatically about committing suicide unless I believed her. I said, ‘I believe you.’ But, you know, how can I protect myself through a thing like that?”

The check from the janitor was the largest single gift the environmental group had ever received.

His voice grew calmer, sadder. “I did kick Wheeler pretty hard in the face for that. I think I was wrong in doing that. The issue is someplace else. I should have been down here sweeping floors.”

Putnam knew his mother had destroyed his relationship with Wheeler and had prevented him from getting his work out into the world, but he never blamed her. He believed that her tactics, however much they hurt him, were the rules of behavior she needed to survive in a world dominated by men.

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“It is especially hard for any woman to be herself,” he once wrote her, “and believe in herself as she is, surrounded as she is with these ridiculous man-made images of how she is supposed to feel and act.”

It’s easy to say why someone is wrong, Putnam said. The hard part is figuring out why they’re right. And everyone is right. Everyone has some central insight, hard won by the consistency-making mechanism of the brain, built of past experiences, cast as motor predictions, a pattern that repeats, sustains itself in the chaos. Our job is to pan for it like gold, sift it into our own nervous systems, reconcile the resulting contradiction, become something new.

“My life’s work, if there is a one-sentence formula for it, is trying to find some path of reconciliation with you,” Putnam wrote her.

Mildred got sick in 1981, and she moved in with her son and Claude. She could have lived anywhere, a mansion in New Orleans, with a staff, like she had back in Ohio, a chef, a housekeeper, nurses. Instead, Putnam gave her the bedroom, and he and Claude slept on the pullout couch. They made for a strange family, content in the knowledge that they were all there for the right reasons. Putnam and Claude took care of Mildred for three years, until she died in 1984.

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Wheeler continued trying to convince Putnam to publish his work. He drove from Princeton to Houma to visit—noting afterward that Putnam was “living as poor as Job’s turkey.” In 1986, Wheeler wrote to Putnam, ending the letter: “There is so much more I’d like to say, but let me sum it all up in one word, gratitude: gratitude to you for all you’ve meant and done over all these years, gratitude to heaven above that you’re still on this earth, still capable—God willing, and in God’s good time—to publish something great.”

December 7, 1987. Putnam swung his leg over his bicycle, like he’d done so many times before.

The drunken swerve.

The screech.

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The silence.

On a fall afternoon in 2024, I wandered the Princeton campus among the towering sculptures. There was Tony Smith’s abstract Moses, Alexander Calder’s Five Disks: One Empty, Antoine Pevsner’s Construction in the Third and Fourth Dimension, and Jacques Lipchitz’s Song of the Vowels. This was the trail of breadcrumbs Putnam left behind.

I watched as other people—students and professors—strolled right past them, as if the sculptures were invisible. Which was weird, because they’re huge. Louise Nevelson’s Atmosphere and Environment X looms 21 feet tall, a steel screen with geometric forms in cut-out compartments that reminded me of a library, or a secret language, or both. Picasso’s Head of a Woman, with her stark, cubist angles, weighs in at 20,000 pounds, her rosy cheeks rendered in red quartzite, swirling eyes in black granite.

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The Princeton sculptures aren’t Putnam’s only breadcrumbs.

Along Cleveland’s Cuyahoga River is Gene Kangas’ Hart Crane Memorial Sculpture, commissioned by Putnam to memorialize the poet, who, after being assaulted onboard a steamship for being gay, jumped overboard and drowned. At Howard University, there’s A Bridge Above and Beyond by Richard Hunt, symbolizing the connection between Africa and her children in America, dedicated to “Black womanhood” and “single mothers everywhere.”

In New York City’s West Village, in a sliver of greenery known as Christopher Park, across from the Stonewall Inn, where 1969 riots sparked the beginning of the gay rights movement in the United States, is a sculpture of four figures by George Segal. Two men, standing, appear deep in conversation, one’s arm wrapped around the other’s shoulder; two women sit side by side on a bench, one’s hand on the other’s knee. When Putnam commissioned the piece, he stipulated that the work “had to be loving and caring, and show the affection that is the hallmark of gay people … and it had to have equal representation of men and women.” When it was installed, the media called it the “first monument to homosexuals in the United States.”

In the center of the Princeton campus, I came upon Oval with Points by Henry Moore, a massive womblike, hollowed-out thing, its bronze now patinated sea-foam green, with two points reaching in toward the center, almost meeting, but not quite. I sat down in the oval and thought about how many things—people, ideas—hide in plain sight, and how many answers to scientific mysteries might be stashed away, junked, or forgotten.

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I thought of Wheeler, who helped pick out this sculpture—he described it as a “place for two friends to sit side by side”—and of his lifelong fear that Putnam’s work would be lost.

It’s impossible to know what might have happened if Putnam had gotten his ideas out when he was alive. When he first worked out his theory, Turing was here in Princeton visiting John von Neumann as he was building a stored-program electronic computer, which the press referred to as an “electronic brain.” The comparison between brains and Turing machines was immediately embraced by the scientific community and so entrenched during Putnam’s lifetime that his suggestion that the brain is a “computer of a fundamentally different genus” simply couldn’t compute.

The reason an induction machine—a mind—can do more than a universal Turing machine is because it’s always reaching out into the world. Which was exactly what Putnam himself struggled to do.

Putnam turned his writings into a self-contained room where Ikey could hide and no one would find him. The only one who managed to crack open the door was Claude. “He teaches me how to live outside words,” Putnam wrote. Claude lived in their Houma apartment until he died in 2008.

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In Ohio’s Morgan Swamp on the southern shoreline of Lake Erie, among beaver ponds and vernal pools, nestled in a forest of yellow birch and hemlock, are tundra swans and four-toed salamanders, white calla lilies and river otters. In the Animas Mountain range in New Mexico, wild turkeys and long-nosed bats, white-sided jackrabbits and spotted owls, live and breed in 500 square miles of unadulterated ecosystem. On the sandbars and shallows of Nebraska’s Platte River, sandhill cranes swoop down on the floodplain to roost and forage en route to the Arctic. Some stop in the Ohio wetlands on their return, where they dance in the shadows of soaring bald eagles headed to nest in Putnam Marsh.

All of these lands still exist thanks, in large part, to Putnam. His will stipulated that upon his death, his money—all $40 million of it—be given to the Nature Conservancy. When the check from the janitor showed up, it was the largest single gift the environmental group had ever received. Putnam would have been happy to remain anonymous. Only the marsh—which he requested be named for his parents—gives him away.

Today, science is beginning to catch up to Putnam. His ideas about the plasticity of the brain and the importance of neural conditioning have become mainstream. Many cognitive scientists are pursuing a theory known as “embodied mind” that emphasizes the central role of motor behavior in cognition and perception, so central to Putnam’s own theory.

At the same time, as Fuller put it, “there’s stuff in Putnam that no one has thought of yet. There’s precious new material for scientists who are on the cutting edge.” That includes not only those working in cognitive science, but also in artificial intelligence and robotics. AI researchers are eagerly searching for models of general intelligence, wondering how it is that humans learn, or have common sense, or deal with novel situations. How humans, as Putnam explained, can perform induction.

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I’d spent more than a decade hunched over inscrutable pages under the weight of so much regret about how Putnam’s story had ended. Now, sitting up in the soft curve of Moore’s sculpture, I traced my fingers along the surface where so many fingers had traced it before; in that one spot, the patina was rubbed clean, and the original bronze shone through. Sunlight glistened off the metal, and it dawned on me that maybe Putnam’s work hadn’t been lost. Maybe it was just waiting for its moment.

Amanda Gefter

Posted on June 17, 2025

Amanda Gefter is a science writer and the author of Trespassing on Einstein’s Lawn. A selection of Peter Putnam’s unpublished papers can be found on her website at amandagefter.com/peterputnam.

Paleontology

- How Neanderthals Got to Siberia

- How Ancient Beasts Spread Sweet Fruits

PALEONTOLOGY | VIEW ON WEBSITE

How Neanderthals Got to Siberia

They trekked for 2,000 years across formidable terrain

By Kristen French    June 19, 2025

Tens of thousands of years ago, during the Pleistocene epoch, Neanderthals trekked more than 2,000 miles on foot from the Caucasus Mountains in Eastern Europe to a chain of caves in the Altai Mountains of Siberia. The journey likely took them just 2,000 years, a new study finds, a relative sprint considering the many major obstacles in their way: dramatic mountain ranges, massive rivers, and potentially hostile evolutionary cousins.

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It was the Neanderthals’ second major migration through the region, according to analysis of DNA found in sediments in caves in Europe and Siberia. (In the years between migrations, glaciers completely separated Europe from Asia.) But until recently, the route of this second wave of Neanderthal migration was a riddle, primarily because of a dearth of archaeological artifacts showing the way.

Now, a team of anthropologists has mapped a potential path into Southern Siberia across the Ural Mountains, which form a rugged gauntlet stretching across what is today west central Russia.  Neanderthals taking this route likely relied on river valleys as natural highways and traveled during the warmer months when the terrain was more accessible, according to Emily Coco, now a postdoctoral researcher at Portugal’s University of Algarve, and Radu Iovita, an associate professor at New York University’s Center for the Study of Human Origins. Previous modeling had suggested they might have traveled during the colder months, instead.

The routes Coco and Iovita identified would have taken the Neanderthals into areas already occupied by Denisovans, which squares with evidence that the two species came into prehistoric contact—in fact, research suggests they interbred.

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Coco and Iovita published their findings, which were based on computer simulations, this month in the journal Plos One. To build their model, they considered the elevation of the terrain, reconstructed the routes of ancient rivers, mapped glaciers that could have obstructed Neanderthals’ migratory path, and calculated temperatures. They also assumed that the Neanderthals did not have a specific destination in mind and that they could only make decisions about where to migrate based on knowledge of local conditions. This simulated approach has been used to map the migrations of animals and humans in other time periods and geographies but had not previously been applied to Neanderthals.

The researchers note that their model doesn’t take into account every factor that could have influenced the migratory decisions of the Neanderthals: access to resources, distance to water, annual or seasonal weather patterns and climate change, vegetation preferences, locations of previous occupations. But it does begin to map out some possibilities and bring the complexity of our ancient ancestors’ wanderings into clearer view.

Lead image: iurii /Shutterstock

Kristen French

Posted on June 19, 2025

Kristen French is an associate editor at Nautilus.

PALEONTOLOGY | VIEW ON WEBSITE

How Ancient Beasts Spread Sweet Fruits

The native forests of South America were shaped by mastodons—and we’re doing a bad job filling their role

By Molly Glick    June 18, 2025

In lush South American forests millions of years ago, trees and massive animals might have helped each other thrive. Trees evolved oversized fruits, which attracted hulking creatures such as mastodons during the Pleistocene epoch. Their menu might have included the bright yellow Chilean palm, the smoky chañar, and the creamy keule. In turn, these beasts may have shepherded seeds long distances via their dung, expanding the trees’ distribution and encouraging genetic diversity.

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This idea was first proposed more than 40 years ago. Now, scientists have unearthed fossil evidence to support it: Fossil teeth from the South American mastodon species, Notiomastodon platensis, suggest that the elephant relative did indeed feast on large fruits such as the Chilean palm, according to recent findings published in Nature Ecology & Evolution.

The fossils, which were dug up from sites spanning more than 900 miles across Chile, contained starch residues and tissues associated with fleshy fruits. Groups of N. platensis may have migrated to the northern region of the country to bountiful foraging grounds—today, their living elephant relatives still hunt for fruit along well-traveled trails.

Mastodons vanished from South America some 10,000 years ago, and livestock, humans, and smaller, fruit-eating animals may have stepped into this fruit-feasting role. But the extinct giants distributed seeds across distances up to 10 times longer than modern animals and gobbled up about 10 times more seeds. And although many of these tree species persist today, without these ancient helpers, their survival is threatened.

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The team modeled the threat of extinction among these heavily fruited South American trees. Today, some of these trees have found new seed messengers—but not all. In central Chile, 40 percent of these plant species are currently threatened. This figure is four times higher than in tropical areas where animals including tapirs or monkeys can fill some of the Pleistocene mammals’ roles. Such plants “now survive in small, fragmented populations with low genetic diversity,” according to a statement. “They are living remnants of an extinct interaction.” Human activity may also contribute to the continuing decline of these ancient trees, of course. For example, harvesting fruit from the Chilean palm tree reduces its chances of seed dispersal.

And the hunt for clues to ancient ecological dynamics will continue. “Paleontology isn’t just about telling old stories,” said study author Florent Rivals, a paleoecologist at the Catalan Institute of Human Paleoecology and Social Evolution in Spain, in the statement. “It helps us recognize what we’ve lost—and what we still have a chance to save.”

Lead illustration by Mauricio Álvarez

Molly Glick

Posted on June 18, 2025

Molly Glick is the newsletter editor of Nautilus.

Zoology

- An Elephant’s Tusk Never Forgets

- Scratch My Back and I’ll Scratch Yours

- What If Every Roadkill Had a Memorial?

- The Hornbills Left Behind

- Humpback Whales Are Way Cooler Than You

ZOOLOGY | VIEW ON WEBSITE

An Elephant’s Tusk Never Forgets

A simple test can peek into ivory to detect deception

By Molly Glick    June 25, 2025

As the Siberian permafrost melts, it’s revealing an increasing number of millennia-old woolly mammoth tusks. These ancient tusks might be sating some of the global demand for ivory from endangered African elephants. But not enough. Between poaching and habitat loss, African elephant populations have plummeted in recent decades.

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To try to evade the law, some smugglers mix legally traded mammoth ivory with contraband elephant ivory, and it’s difficult to distinguish between these relatives without costly tests—radiocarbon dating and molecular analysis—that can take weeks to yield answers.

So scientists from the University of Hong Kong have proposed a cheaper, speedier solution to keep African elephant tusks out of the trade. By comparing the ratios of certain elements’ isotopes in tusks, law enforcement could easily pinpoint which hulking proboscideans the ivory belonged to, according to results recently published in Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution.

The team analyzed 79 pieces of ivory, which included 44 samples from elephants and 35 from mammoths. They inspected the ratios of five elements—sulfur, hydrogen, carbon, nitrogen, and oxygen—to determine which would be most helpful in distinguishing between the animals.

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Ultimately, the oxygen and hydrogen isotope ratios seemed to deliver the clearest results.

This is due to their distinct locales, the paper noted: The water once sipped by mammoths in high-latitude regions like Siberia contains unique ratios of isotopes compared with those in water consumed by elephants in tropical spots.

But the technique has not yet been perfected. The researchers noted that aspects such as an animal’s age, or the specific part of the tusk sampled, might impact the results. While the test is not yet ready for the courtroom, the team notes in a statement that it could already offer “quick, efficient first screening step.” And help the African elephant not go the way of the wooly mammoth just yet.

Lead image: Johann Mader / Shutterstock

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Molly Glick

Posted on June 25, 2025

Molly Glick is the newsletter editor of Nautilus.

ZOOLOGY | VIEW ON WEBSITE

Scratch My Back and I’ll Scratch Yours

Orcas in Washington are creating grooming tools out of kelp stalks

By Sarah DeWeerdt    June 23, 2025

One day last June, scientists from the Center for Whale Research launched a drone camera above a group of orcas swimming off the coast of Washington State. They captured 20 minutes of footage featuring a whale known as Shachi interacting with her young grandson, Nova. The whales gently rolled against each other’s sides and braided their bodies together in what at first seemed like a particularly vivid example of the orcas’ social, tactile nature.

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But back on land, reviewing the footage on a bigger screen, the researchers noticed something unexpected: The whales seemed to be holding between their bodies a roughly two-foot-long piece of bull kelp, a type of large seaweed that fringes islands and rocky coastlines in the whales’ home range.

The pair arched into exaggerated S-shapes, deftly rolling the plant matter along their bodies. When the kelp fell out of place, the younger whale would swim back and retrieve it in his mouth, then balance it on his snout and nudge it against his grandmother’s body once more. The researchers eventually realized the whales must be using the kelp stalks as a kind of tool for massage. Whereas most animals manipulate tools with the mouth or appendages, these whales were using their trunks, requiring an impressively precise coordination of the body.

“It highlights how important touch is” in cetaceans.

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In a paper published today in the journal Current Biology, the researchers dubbed this behavior “allokelping.” The observations add to scientists’ growing understanding of tool use in non-human animals, and serve as a rare example of tool use among whales and other cetaceans. It also represents what is likely the first time that marine mammals have been spotted building tools: The whales don’t just grab existing pieces of kelp but rather use their teeth to pluck stalks growing in a kelp bed or tangled in a floating mat, using the stalk’s drag and a jerking motion of the head to break off a segment that is suitable for this act of mutual rubdown.

So far, allokelping appears to be unique to the Southern Resident population of orcas, the critically endangered clan of orcas to which Shachi and Nova belong. But Michael Weiss, the research director of the Center for Whale Research, has come to believe that it is integral to their way of being: “This is actually one of their primary social behaviors,” he says.

The next time the researchers launched the drone, they saw other Southern Residents doing something similar. As the 2024 field season rolled on, they accumulated more and more examples of the behavior. And they realized there was evidence of it in the very first flight the team had made back in April with their new drone: Its powerful zoom lens was revealing the particulars of orca life in crisper, finer detail than ever before.

“It highlights how important touch is” in cetaceans, says Ana Eguiguren, a graduate student at Dalhousie University in Canada, “which we haven’t been able to study much, just because of how hard it is, until we were able to see them with drones.” Eguiguren, who was not involved in the recent study, has been investigating social touch in sperm whales.

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FAMILY BONDING:  Shachi and her grandson Nova use a piece of bull kelp to massage one another. This use of kelp, which the whales break off in pieces, represents the first time cetaceans have been observed creating tools out of existing materials. Credit: Center for Whale Research, NMFS NOAA Permit 27038.

To get a sense of whether the behavior is novel or longstanding, Weiss and his team have combed through drone videos from previous years, zooming in for closeups and examining the lower quality footage frame by frame for evidence of allokelping. “It’s something that you absolutely have to be looking for in these other videos,” Weiss says. “But they’ve been doing this since at least 2019, and probably much longer than that.” The researchers have seen the whales allokelping this year, too, so it seems the behavior was not just a temporary fad.

In the new paper, the researchers analyze 30 bouts of allokelping observed from April through July 2024. The videos feature whales of all ages, both males and females, and members of all three pods—J, K, and L—that make up the Southern Resident community. The videos of J pod, whom the researchers encountered most often during that period, and which includes Schachi and Nova, feature 19 of 25 individuals and members of all six families.

Michael Haslam, an independent researcher who has studied tool use across the animal kingdom and was not involved in the work, says “the amount of time they were able to get, the hours of observation of three different pods,” is “impressive.”

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Observations of tool use in cetaceans are sparse. Bottlenose dolphins in western Australia use sponges to protect their snouts as they forage along the sandy bottom, and humpback dolphins may employ sponges in mating displays. Some researchers consider the waves Antarctic orcas generate with their bodies to wash seals and other prey off of ice floes and the bubbles they blow to confuse prey in the water to constitute tools. But cetaceans have never before been observed actively creating tools by modifying an existing object.

“That was a really big piece of the puzzle for us, where we realized there was some kind of intentional fashioning going on,” says Rachel John, a graduate student at the University of Exeter in the United Kingdom who was the first to spot the kelp in the video of Shachi and Nova. “They weren’t just finding these perfect lengths of kelp floating around.”

“Allokelping” is a portmanteau that nods to kelping—an activity in which cetaceans including Southern Resident orcas roll around in kelp beds, lift kelp with their flukes, and drape it across their bodies—and allogrooming—the tendency of many species across the animal kingdom to bathe and groom each other, which contributes to both hygiene and social bonds.

The researchers hypothesize that allokelping serves both of these functions for the Southern Residents, which would both be new purposes for tool use in cetaceans. Allokelping appears to be most common between members of the same matrilineal family or between whales of a similar age, bolstering the view that it contributes to social bonds. Once, the researchers watched two young whales, Tofino and Phoenix, allokelping after a failed hunt. “They were chasing a fish around. They missed it. It swam into the shallows in this kelp forest where they couldn’t get it,” Weiss says. “It almost seemed like, as a consolation, they grabbed some kelp and pulled it out and started allokelping together.”

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The team’s evidence that allokelping contributes to hygiene is more tentative. Whales with larger areas of molting skin are more likely to engage in the behavior, but more data are necessary to confirm this pattern, and it’s not clear whether allokelping simply feels good, like scratching an itch, or actually contributes to skin health.

The researchers aim to learn more about the circumstances that motivate the orcas to engage in allokelping, and how young orcas learn to do it. The two youngest Southern Resident calves—born in December 2024 and April 2025—haven’t yet been seen allokelping, but the babies seem very interested in kelp, Weiss says.

If a calf’s mother or sibling is carrying some, he says, “they will just swim up to their mouth and basically just stare, turn sideways and just stare at this piece of kelp and swim along with them.”

Lead image: Sara Hysong-Shimazu / Shutterstock

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Sarah DeWeerdt

Posted on June 23, 2025

Sarah DeWeerdt is a freelance writer in Seattle covering biology, medicine, and the environment.

ZOOLOGY | VIEW ON WEBSITE

What If Every Roadkill Had a Memorial?

Road ecology meets community science

By Menno Schilthuizen    June 20, 2025

We saw it happening, my then-girlfriend and I: The little bird suddenly flew out of the bushes by the roadside, darted low across the tarmac, and then disappeared into the right rear wheel of the car in front of us. It was centrifuged for a few revolutions before it was ejected sideways and landed, flapping in an uncoordinated fashion, in the verge.

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I quickly parked the car, walked back, squatted down, and picked up the animal: a Sardinian warbler, a pretty, very common bird; petite and not at all resistant to the racking it had just suffered. My girlfriend squatted beside me. Together we watched how the bird attempted a few half-hearted wing flaps, weakly pecked my fingertip, and then lost the light in its little beady eyes and died in the palm of my hand.

At that moment, to my surprise as much as to my girlfriend’s, I was overcome by sadness, and for a few minutes I sat there, crying, by the side of a country road in the Peloponnese, cradling a dead warbler in my hand, with claxoning cars swishing by and my girlfriend comforting me with a slightly bewildered look on her face. Fifteen minutes later, when we were driving again, she quietly asked me how come the death of a bird affected me so, when I am such an animal mass murderer myself.

She hit the nail—or rather, the insect pin—on the head. Throughout my life as a scientist I have been responsible for the scientifically sanctioned deaths of hundreds of thousands of animals, mostly arthropods and mollusks. In fact, earlier that day I had merrily stuffed some snails into a jar of alcohol. And although I have never killed any vertebrates, I have regularly participated in field trips where others were collecting frogs, small mammals, and also cute little birdies like that Sardinian warbler, and never shed a tear.

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He saw entire families of graylag geese and barn swallows being mowed down.

So why would I cry over the death of this bird? Analyzing my emotions, I concluded that what had touched me was the utter senselessness of this death. An animal that is killed and preserved by a researcher contributes to the knowledge that we have of its species. It is lovingly curated, its features are recorded, it is the object of study and the subject of scientific publications, and it is preserved for eternity in a natural history museum collection. Yes, its life has been lost, but its body has obtained a new kind of value.

Roadkill is the complete opposite of that. That motorist did not kill that warbler intentionally; in fact, he or she probably never even noticed the collision. And that ignorance and lack of intent are what make the event so tragic. A little life has been ripped from this Earth (and, who knows, if it was a nesting bird with dependent chicks, several lives) and its value has been lost forever.

Not that the worth of these animals is obvious to everyone. The American anthropologist Jane Desmond, who published a study of the cultural impact of roadkill, concludes, “These animal lives have little value for most of the [people] in the United States, as these animals are unowned, lacking in monetary or emotional value, not pets or livestock, and without the charismatic following that megafauna like elephants and lions in zoos receive.”

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Nonetheless, most people are uncomfortably aware of our indifference toward the multitude of road deaths of pet-sized mammals and birds, and their unease emerges as humor. The faux field guide “Flattened Fauna” by Roger Knutson, for example, provides species-specific diagrams to recognize the two-dimensional shapes of pancaked animals and a handy “death list” in the back to tick off the ones you have spotted. Then there is Buck Peterson’s trilogy of hillbilly-esque humor, the Original Roadkill Cookbook, the International Roadkill Cookbook, and the Roadkill USA Coloring and Activity Book. And, admittedly, when I lived in Malaysia and on the road passed through the unmistakable pong of a dead Sunda stink badger (Mydaus javanensis), would I not spontaneously burst into singing Loudon Wainwright III’s all-time favorite tune, “Dead Skunk in the Middle of the Road (Stinking to High Heaven)”?

Crude humor aside, I recognize familiar sentiments in the work by artists who are, for lack of a better word, inspired by roadkill. In her “Roadside Memorial Project,” the Kentucky-based artist and activist L. A. Watson has been creating reflective silhouettes of animals, which she installs among the grass in the verges of roads in her home state wherever an animal of that species has been run over. They function both as a warning sign to drivers and as a memorial to the dead individual in question. On the project’s home page, Watson writes:

The color white was chosen … because it references the iconography of human roadside memorial crosses and denotes innocence, sacrifice, spirits, and ghostly specters. The installation comes to life at night, and is “turned on” by the passing drivers who illuminate it, many of whom slow down.

In a similar project, the eco-artist Brian D. Collier builds roadside shrines for animals, complete with the date of death and a color picture of the deceased, akin to the ones we sometimes see erected along the road for people who have lost their lives in traffic accidents. Jane Desmond writes of his work:

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Streetside shrines … to roadkilled animals may be tiny acts of recognition, but they point to the possibility of greater emotional cognizance of animal carnage on highways. … Similar shrines … could clutter the road with the marking of accumulated deaths, too innumerable to count as we go whizzing by.

And clutter the road with shrines is exactly what my colleague Bram Koese did. Koese is one of the best freshwater zoologists of the Netherlands, specializing in mayflies and caddisflies but with a near encyclopedic knowledge of most other aquatic animals, and terrestrial ones, for that matter. He lives in a town, surrounded by wetlands and canals, some 30 kilometers south of Amsterdam, and takes regular bicycle rides along the Ziendeweg, a narrow road between his hometown and the next. During rush hour many commuters use it to circumvent the traffic jams on the highway. And these speeding cars often hit wildlife, Koese noticed. He saw entire families of graylag geese (Anser anser) and barn swallows (Hirundo rustica) being mowed down.

Prompted by these sad encounters, and curious about the actual impact of the traffic on wildlife, he began logging his roadkill sightings on the citizen science platform Observation International. For a whole year, on average every other day, he would ride up and down the road, scanning with a headlamp if it was dark, and record and photograph every dead animal (birds, mammals, amphibians, even the occasional butterfly or migrating crayfish) and its location.

His sightings amounted to 642 carcasses. The “death list” included 35 mammals, 90 birds, and 515 amphibians, among which were rare and protected species such as the stoat (Mustela erminea), weasel (Mustela nivalis), European polecat (Mustela putorius), tawny owl (Strix aluco), moor frog (Rana arvalis), and natterjack toad (Epidalea calamita). Shocked by the volume of his data, and disenchanted by the lack of response he got from the municipality, Koese then hatched a secret plan for a clever guerrilla campaign.

One roadkill is a tragedy, but a million roadkills are not just a statistic.

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Quietly asking around in the neighborhood and among family and friends, at the local nature conservation organization, and at the bicycle workshop, he managed to round up some 25 coconspirators. Together they assembled not one but 642 roadside shrines. Each was made from a one-meter-long stake of live willow wood (leftovers from recent willow coppicing—so they could still take root when stuck into the ground). Friends with a large garden sawed the crossbeams from old floorboards of Koese’s stepfather’s and whitened them, while Koese and his girlfriend whitened all vertical stakes with chalk (it took them 20 days). Each cross would come to represent a separate roadkill exactly at the spot where it had taken place. The name of the species and the date of its demise were stenciled on the crossbeam, and a picture of the live animal was placed next to a QR code that led to the record on the Observation International website, where a photo of the animal in its flattened state could be viewed.

Installing the crosses turned out to be quite an operation because the team wanted to eschew the use of any motorized road vehicles and also because the COVID-19 regulations required many online briefings to coordinate and discuss the marching orders. On Thursday, May 7, 2021, a friend of Koese’s came with his flatbottom boat. With the help of five workers from the bicycle workshop, they transported all the stakes from Koese’s house to the boat (“The guys found the work a little tedious, but we managed to motivate them with chocolate cake,” says Koese) and then on to the Ziendeweg (which runs parallel to a canal). That evening, a team of three volunteers used chalk to mark all 642 locations on the road, while another team transported the stakes, by boat and carrier cycles, and hid them, with ground drills and sledge hammers, in the bushes at three locations.

The next morning, at the crack of dawn, 10 two- to three-person teams quietly took their positions along the road, each responsible for the installation of some 60 crosses. Then, using wheelbarrows, a canoe, and the flatbottom boat, volunteers distributed the stakes, drills, and hammers among the groups, while, still in the quiet predawn hour, two volunteers on carrier cycles handed out the crossbeams with the names and the QR codes. Once everything was in place, the teams quickly and simultaneously began hammering away and installing the crosses along the roadside. When the sun was up, and before the rush hour began, it was a magnificent sight, and looked exactly as Jane Desmond had envisaged it: an endless parade of white crosses stretching to the horizon along the four-kilometer-long straight road, making every driver (as well as the local authorities, who learned about it from the local and national media that Koese had notified) painfully aware of the “innumerable accumulated deaths.”

But not for long. As it turned out, not everybody in the neighborhood was sympathetic toward the campaign, and within a day after they had been set up, all the crosses had been kicked down (perhaps by the same person who had stuffed a recently installed underpass intended for otter crossings with plastic foam and set it on fire). Koese and his team resurrected most of the crosses, only to find them again vandalized the next day. But they were not disheartened: By that time the project had served its purpose. Koese, his team, and their cause were in the news for the whole weekend, the local authorities had been presented both with a letter and a scientific report with a detailed analysis of the findings, and a strong case had been made for the road to be out of bounds for anything but local traffic.

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Koese’s project drives home two things. First, that road ecology, as it is called, is a perfect subject for community science projects. Good online platforms exist for logging roadkill events, and the community group could adopt guerrilla tactics for their campaign that an “official” project would probably not have got away with. (Moreover, these community projects tend to be focused on the impact of traffic on wildlife, whereas many officially approved roadkill monitoring projects are begun for the opposite reason: to control the impact of wildlife on traffic.)

The second point is that one roadkill is a tragedy, but a million roadkills are not just a statistic. By upscaling from a single roadside shrine in memory of a single deceased animal to a mass grave that showed the actual scale of the problem, Koese and his team were able to make us seamlessly progress from mourning the loss of one individual animal’s life to grasping the danger that entire populations are exposed to.

Lead photo: Some of the 642 handmade shrines created by biologist Bram Koese, marking roadkilled animals along a Dutch commuter route. ©Bram Koese

This story is an excerpt from The Urban Naturalist and is reprinted with permission from MIT Press Reader.

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Menno Schilthuizen

Posted on June 20, 2025

Menno Schilthuizen is a senior scientist at Naturalis Biodiversity Center in Leiden and a professor of evolution and biodiversity at Leiden University. He is the director of a nonprofit for community science, the Taxon Foundation, and with his wife, cave biologist Iva Njunjić, he runs Taxon Expeditions, a scientific travel agency focused on discovering new species of wildlife. This article is excerpted from his book The Urban Naturalist.

ZOOLOGY | VIEW ON WEBSITE

The Hornbills Left Behind

Protecting Asian species may have shifted poachers’ focus to African birds

By Marina Wang    June 19, 2025

In October of 2023, a shipment of 45 hornbill skulls from Cameroon in Africa was seized by United States Fish and Wildlife Service officials at an airport in New York City. The skulls were shorn of feathers, the eye sockets bare, the long beaks stacked together in rows. Hornbills are a family of tropical birds with bulbous bills (think Zazu, from the Lion King), some of which sport horn-like features known as casques. The shipment was part of a burgeoning new trade in hornbill skulls from Africa.

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“I wasn’t aware there was a trade coming into the States—that was shocking,” says Lucy Kemp, co-chair at the IUCN Hornbill Specialist Group and the director of the Mabula Ground-Hornbill Project in South Africa.

Hornbills have been traded in East Asia for more than 1,000 years. Some species, such as the helmeted hornbill, have very large and dense ivory-like casques that are carved into jewelry and other ornaments, making them especially popular targets of traffickers. But unsustainable hunting practices over the past century led to a precipitous decline in hornbill populations, and in 1992, almost all Asian species of hornbill were protected under the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES), an organization that regulates the international wildlife trade.

“Those forests have no hornbills left now.”

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In a new paper, Kemp and her colleagues suggest that granting protection of Asian species has shifted trafficking focus onto their African relatives, similar to the way banning trade in pangolins from Asia in 2000 led to a surge in poaching in Africa. It’s a dynamic that has been repeated for a number of different species in Africa after their cousins in Asia get protection from CITES, the authors note in their research. Though 32 species of hornbills reside in African forests, woodlands, savannahs, and grasslands—representing half of all hornbill diversity—thus far, none of the African species have received protection.

The research team analyzed data from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service on hornbill head seizure, as well as social media posts advertising hornbills—live or in parts—for sale. The analysis found that at least 2,552 hornbills were traded in the U.S. between 1999 and 2024, with trade growing an average 3 percent per year. And 95 percent of these hornbills were African species. Social media analysis, meanwhile, revealed a market for live hornbills that are captured in Africa and sold as pets in Asia.

TRADE OFF: Protecting Asian Hornbill species seems to have led poachers to go after African species instead. Pictured here, a shipment of 45 hornbill skulls from Cameroon seized at JFK Airport in 2023. Photo from Tinsmann, J., et al. Biological Conservation (2025).

The growth of the African hornbill market is likely to be relatively new—interviews with hunters in Cameroon reveal that the market has proliferated in the last six years, with 91 percent of skulls going to foreign buyers. “In Africa there’s always been some trade in heads, but it’s always been sort of a byproduct of the bushmeat trade,” says Kemp. Harvesting wasn’t happening at a scale that conservationists were concerned about. Now, traders are traveling to villages to specifically source hornbill heads to supply a foreign demand. According to a 2024 study, hunters in Cameroon are paid just over $5 on average per head, while they are sold to online buyers in Europe for a median of $158. One hunter recalled receiving an order for 150 skulls.

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“It’s led to absolute decimation,” says Kemp. “We have some colleagues doing forest surveys—those forests have no hornbills left now.” Many species of hornbill are long-lived and have few offspring, so they are especially vulnerable to being wiped out by hunting pressures, Kemp explains. For example, over 100 yellow-casqued hornbills are imported to the U.S. each year, while fewer than 10,000 of these birds likely remain in the wild.

Aparajita Datta, a hornbill specialist at the Nature Conservation Foundation who was not involved in the study, says she was surprised to learn about this new and prolific market in hornbill skulls. “One of the critical things for me is investigating why and where this started,” she says. “Is it just because it’s an oddity and bizarre-looking? Is it just a talking point for people”

In the meantime, Kemp is calling on CITES to list large, forested hornbills from Africa, with more species to hopefully follow. A listing in CITES would draw attention to the plight of the hornbills and require countries to collect data on the trade.

She just hopes such efforts haven’t come too late.

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Lead image: Vitezslav Halamka / Shutterstock

Marina Wang

Posted on June 19, 2025

Marina Wang is a multimedia journalist from Calgary, Alberta. Her work has appeared in Hakai, Atlas Obscura, CBC, Science Magazine, Canadian Geographic, and many other publications.

ZOOLOGY | VIEW ON WEBSITE

Humpback Whales Are Way Cooler Than You

Just take a look at these smoke rings

By Bob Grant    June 13, 2025

Few animal species are less in need of an image upgrade than the majestic humpback whale. But scientists have recently collected evidence that the marine mammals blow playful bubbles akin to the smoke rings blown by old-timey cartoon cowboys, once considered a hallmark of cool. Compiling footage of 12 such ring-production episodes, the researchers recently reported their findings in Marine Mammal Science.

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Although humpbacks and other whale species have long been known to blow bubble nets that can corral prey for capture and to puff strings and bursts of bubbles when competing for mates, this is the first time that researchers have documented humpbacks producing large bubble rings at the ocean’s surface—apparently friskily directed toward humans.

BUBBLE, BUBBLE: This composite image shows at least one bubble ring from each of the recent episodes. Photo credits: (a) D. Knaub, (b) F. Nicklen, (c) D. Perrine, (d) W. Davis, (e) G. Flipse, (f) A. Henry, (g) M. Gaughan, (h) H. Romanchik, (i) D. Patton, (j) D. Perrine, (k) S. Istrup, (l) S. Hilbourne.

“We show they are blowing bubble rings in our direction in an apparent attempt to playfully interact, observe our response, and/or engage in some form of communication,” said Fred Sharpe, an animal behaviorist and coauthor on the paper, in a statement.

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The 12 reports of humpbacks making bubble rings—39 produced by 11 individual whales—came from researchers, naturalists, and citizen scientists who photographed or videoed the episodes in both the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. The authors then interviewed the observers to glean more information about their bubble ring experiences. Only two of these episodes were associated with foraging, while the authors suggest that the remaining 10 involved inquisitive interactions with humans aboard boats, swimming, or in light aircraft.

The research was conducted under the umbrella of Whale SETI, an organization that seeks to decode the intricacies of humpback whale communication as an avenue to understand non-human intelligence in the context of the search for extraterrestrial intelligence.

And just for the record, smoking is NOT cool. But bubble-blowing humpbacks are.

Lead image: Molly Gaughan

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Bob Grant

Posted on June 13, 2025

Bob Grant is the deputy editor at Nautilus.

Table of Contents

Nautilus: 2025 Jun 25

Arts

What We Misunderstand About Robots

Astronomy

The Woman Behind the World’s Biggest Camera

How to Build a Planet from Dust

Communication

The Octopus Propaganda Hidden in Modern Maps

Environment

The Weird Cooling Effect of Wildfires

We Are the Ocean

If Oaks and Orchids Could Talk

Health

Sleep Has No Magic Number

How To Tell If You’re Dead

Math

When Monsters Came for Mathematics

Microbiology

The Sublime Smarts of Slime Molds

Neuroscience

The Science of Tripping Comes to Town

Dude, You Stink

Finding Peter Putnam

Paleontology

How Neanderthals Got to Siberia

How Ancient Beasts Spread Sweet Fruits

Zoology

An Elephant’s Tusk Never Forgets

Scratch My Back and I’ll Scratch Yours

What If Every Roadkill Had a Memorial?

The Hornbills Left Behind

Humpback Whales Are Way Cooler Than You