The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2014 (23 page)

It starts in the barn on other days too, every morning of the year, in fact. The sheep are both eager and wary at the sight of you, the bringer of hay, the reaper of wool, as you enter the barn for the daily accounts. You switch on the overhead bulb and inhale the florid scents of sweet feed and hay and mineral urine, and there they stand all eyeing you with horizontal pupils, reliably here for every occasion, the blizzard nights and early spring mornings of lambing. You hurry out at dawn to find dumbfounded mothers of twins licking their wispy trembling slips of children, exhorting them to look alive in the guttural chortle that only comes into the throat of a ewe when she's just given birth. The sloe-eyed flock mistrusts you fundamentally, but still they will all come running when you shake the exquisite bucket of grain, the money that talks to yearlings and chary wethers alike, and loudest of all to the ravenous barrel-round pregnant ewes. They gallop home with their udders tolling like church bells. In all weather you take their measure and send them out again to the pasture. And oh, how willingly they return to their posts, with their gentle gear-grinding jaws and slowly thickening wool under winter's advance, beginning your sweater for you at the true starting gate.

Everything starts, of course, with the sheep and the grass. Beneath her greening scalp the earth frets and dreams, and knits herself wordless. Between her breasts, on all hillsides too steep for the plow, the sheep place little sharp feet on invisible paths and lead their curly-haired sons and daughters out onto the tart green blades of eternal breakfast. It starts on tumbled-up lambspring mornings when you slide open the heavy barn door and expel the pronking gambol of newborn wildhooray into daylight. And in summer haze when they scramble up onto boulders and scan the horizon with eyes made to fit it just-so, horizontal eyes, flattened to that shape by the legions of distant skulking predators avoided for all of time. And in the gloaming, when the ewes high up on the pasture suddenly raise their heads at the sight of you, conceding to come down as a throng in their rocking-horse gait, surrendering under dog-press to the barn-tendered mercy of nightfall. It starts where everything starts, with the weather. The muffleblind snows, the dingle springs, the singular pursuit of cud, the fibrous alchemy of the herd spinning grass into wool. This is all your business. Hands plunged into a froth of yarn are as helpless as hands thrust into a lover's hair, for they are divining the grass-pelt life of everything: the world. The sunshine, heavenly photosynthetic host, sweet leaves of grass all singing the fingers electric that tingle to brace the coming winter, charged by the plied double helices of all creatures that have prepared and justly survived on the firmament of patience and swaddled children. It's all of a piece. All one thing.

FROM
The New York Times Magazine

 

R
IGHT NOW, SIX PEOPLE
are living in a nearly windowless, white geodesic dome on the slopes of Hawaii's Mauna Loa volcano. They sleep in tiny rooms, use no more than eight minutes of shower time a week, and subsist on a diet of freeze-dried, canned, or preserved food. When they go outside, they exit through a mock air lock, clad head to toe in simulated space suits. The dome's occupants are playing a serious version of the game of pretend—what if we lived on Mars?

Research at the Hawaii Space Exploration Analog and Simulation (HI-SEAS) project, funded in part by NASA, is a continuation of a long history of attempts to understand what will happen to people who travel through outer space for long periods of time. It's more than a technical problem. Besides multistage rockets to propel a spacecraft out of Earth's atmosphere, years of planning and precise calculations, and massive amounts of fuel, traveling the tens of millions of miles to Mars will take a tremendous amount of time. With current technology, the journey takes more than eight months each way.

Which means that astronauts will get bored. In fact, a number of scientists say that—of all things—boredom is one of the biggest threats to a manned Mars mission, despite the thrill inherent in visiting another planet. And so, attention is being paid to the effects of boredom at HI-SEAS and on the International Space Station. But because of the causes of chronic boredom, scientists say, research facilities in Antarctica might actually provide a better simulation of the stress of a journey to Mars.

Most living things constantly seek out sensory stimulation—new smells, tastes, sights, sounds, or experiences. Even single-celled amoebas will move to investigate new sources of light or heat, says Sheryl Bishop, who studies human performance in extreme environments at the University of Texas Medical Branch. Animals deprived of naturalistic environments and the mental stimulation that comes with them can fall into repetitive, harmful patterns of behavior. Anybody of a certain age will remember zoos full of maniacally pacing tigers, bears gnawing on their metal cages, and birds that groomed themselves bald—all a result, we now know, of their rather unstimulating lifestyles.

Human boredom isn't quite as well understood, says James Danckert, a professor of cognitive neuroscience at the University of Waterloo. He's currently working on what he says may be the first study of how our brain activity changes when we're bored. Danckert is hoping to find out whether boredom is connected to a phenomenon called the “default network”—a background hum of brain activity that seems to remain on even when you aren't directly focused on something. There's a lot of observable activity in the brains of people who are staring at a blank screen—way more than anybody expected, Danckert says. The default network maps closely to the brain-activity patterns scientists see when someone's mind is wandering. It suggests that what we call a restless mind is just that—a mind desperate for something to amuse it, searching frantically for stimulus.

Boredom, it turns out, is a form of stress. Psychologically, it's the mirror image of having too much work to do, says Jason Kring, president of the Society of Human Performance in Extreme Environments, an organization that studies how people live and work in space, underwater, on mountaintops and other high-risk places. If your brain does not receive sufficient stimulus, it might find something else to do—it daydreams, it wanders, it thinks about itself. If this goes on too long, it can affect your mind's normal functioning. Chronic boredom correlates with depression and attention deficits.

Astronaut candidates go through two years of training before they're even approved to fly. And before they are chosen to be candidates, they have to compete against thousands of other applicants. The 2013 class, for instance, had more than six thousand applicants, and only eight were chosen. Astronauts are rigorously tested for psychological as well as physical fitness. But no mission in NASA's history has raised the specter of chronic boredom to the degree that a Mars mission does, because none has involved such a long journey through nothingness.

What if, millions of miles from home, a chronically bored astronaut forgets a certain safety procedure? What if he gets befuddled while reading an oxygen gauge? More important, Danckert and Kring say, bored people are also prone to taking risks, subconsciously seeking out stimulation when their environment bores them.

The cognitive and social psychologist Peter Suedfeld says that people will sometimes do reckless, stupid things when they suffer from chronic boredom. In Antarctica, where winter can cut scientists and crew off from the rest of the world for as long as nine months, the isolation can lead to strange behavior. Suedfeld told me he has heard about Antarctic researchers venturing outside in 40-below weather without proper clothing and without telling anyone else they were going out.

The diaries of early polar explorers are full of tales of extreme boredom, depression, and desperate attempts at entertainment reminiscent of prisoners' stories from solitary confinement. An important lesson that Antarctica can impart on a Mars expedition is this: even scientists on important missions can get excruciatingly bored.

One effective way astronauts combat boredom is by staying busy with work. That's a strategy at HI-SEAS, where the crew member Kate Greene told me that her schedule is packed—every hour planned and accounted for, from the time she wakes up to the time she goes to bed at night. Life on the International Space Station is similar. (In fact, historically, NASA's problem has been overworking people: in 1973, the exhausted crew of Skylab 4 actually staged a relaxation rebellion and took an unscheduled day off.) But Antarctica is different from HI-SEAS or the International Space Station. Communications are limited. There's nobody outside the base directing your day. Spectacular views vanish in a haze of white. It's just you, the people you came in with, no way out, and little to break up the monotony.

And so some researchers there have learned to actively fend off boredom by creating what you might call a unique office culture. They celebrate a ridiculous number of holidays, both traditional and invented. You need something to look forward to, Suedfeld says, and planning the events helps change the routine. Even Ernest Shackleton's Antarctic crew found ways to put on skits and concerts. On one expedition, Shackleton brought a small printing press. At McMurdo Station, the 1983 winter crew created costumes, learned lines, and acted out scenes from the movie
Escape From New York.
It's possible that we may someday watch recordings of Mars-bound astronauts acting out other John Carpenter films. (It's not so far-fetched. Chris Hadfield, a Canadian astronaut, made a tribute to David Bowie's
Space Oddity
that racked up more than 16 million views on YouTube.)

It might sound absurd, but many scientists say strategies like this are necessary because without proper mental stimulus, we risk making a physically and technologically challenging endeavor into a psychologically grueling one. It would be catastrophic if humanity's greatest voyage were brought low by the mind's tendency to wander when left to its own devices.

FROM
The New Yorker

 

I

 

On April 4, 1796—or, according to the French Revolutionary calendar in use at the time, 15 Germinal, Year IV—Jean-Léopold-Nicholas-Frédéric Cuvier, known, after a brother who had died, simply as Georges, delivered his first public lecture at the National Institute of Science and Arts in Paris. Cuvier, who was twenty-six, had arrived in the city a year earlier, shortly after the end of the Reign of Terror. He had wide-set gray eyes, a prominent nose, and a temperament that a friend compared to the exterior of the earth—generally cool, but capable of violent tremors and eruptions. Cuvier had grown up in a small town on the Swiss border and had almost no connections in the capital. Nevertheless, he had managed to secure a prestigious research position there, thanks to the passing of the ancien régime, on the one hand, and his own sublime self-regard, on the other. An older colleague later described him as popping up in the city “like a mushroom.”

For his inaugural lecture, Cuvier decided to speak about elephants. Although he left behind no record to explain his choice, it's likely that it had to do with loot. France was in the midst of the military campaigns that would lead to the Napoleonic Wars and had recently occupied Belgium and the Netherlands. Booty, in the form of art, jewels, seeds, machinery, and minerals, was streaming into Paris. As the historian of science Martin J. S. Rudwick relates, in
Bursting the Limits of Time
(2005), a hundred and fifty crates' worth was delivered to the city's National Museum of Natural History. Included among the rocks and dried plants were two elephant skulls, one from Ceylon—now Sri Lanka—and the other from the Cape of Good Hope, in present-day South Africa.

By this point, Europe was well acquainted with elephants; occasionally one of the animals had been brought to the Continent as a royal gift, or to travel with a fair. (One touring elephant, known as Hansken, was immortalized by Rembrandt.) Europeans knew that there were elephants in Africa, which were considered to be dangerous, and elephants in Asia, which were said to be more docile. Still, elephants were regarded as elephants, much as dogs were dogs, some gentle and others ferocious. Cuvier, in his first few months in Paris, had examined with care the plundered skulls and had reached his own conclusion. Asian and African elephants, he told his audience, represented two distinct species.

“It is clear that the elephant from Ceylon differs more from that of Africa than the horse from the ass or the goat from the sheep,” he declared. Among the animals' many distinguishing characteristics were their teeth. The elephant from Ceylon had molars with wavy ridges on the surface, “like festooned ribbons,” while the elephant from the Cape of Good Hope had teeth with ridges arranged in the shape of diamonds. Looking at live animals would not have revealed this difference, as who would have the temerity to peer at an elephant's molars? “It is to anatomy alone that zoology owes this interesting discovery,” Cuvier said.

Having successfully sliced the elephant in two, Cuvier continued with his dissection. Over the decades, the museum had acquired a variety of old bones that appeared elephantine. These included a three-and-a-half-foot-long femur, a tusk the size of a jousting lance, and several teeth that weighed more than five pounds each. Some of the bones came from Siberia, others from North America. Cuvier had studied these old bones as well. His conclusions, once again, were unequivocal. The bones were the fragmentary remains of two new species, which differed from both African and Asian elephants “as much as, or more than, the dog differs from the jackal.” Moreover—and here one imagines a hush falling over his audience—both creatures had vanished from the face of the earth. Cuvier referred to the first lost species as a mammoth, and the second as an “Ohio animal.” A decade later, he would invent a new name for the beast from Ohio; he would call it a mastodon.