SCIENCE THAT MATTERS ® EXPLORE ALIEN WORLDS ON EARTH p.42 SECRETS OF THE HIDDEN BENEFITS OF VIDEO GAMES p.62 INVASIVE SPECIES – THEY’RE DELICIOUS! p.34 HOW FONTS AFFECT MEMORY p.10 WHAT YOU NEVER KNEW ABOUT HOW THEY LIVED, WORKED AND FOUGHT p.24 SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2022 DISCOVERMAGAZINE.COM 0 0 928 1 0 1 37 2 3 1 0 $6.99 U.S.
For years, Archaeological Paths’ exclusive historical tours of Egypt have attracted travelers drawn to the country’s ancient past. For many, cruising down the Nile, visiting the ancient tombs of the pharaohs, exploring the Pyramids of Giza, or marveling at the Great Sphinx are bucket-list items. But the challenge of fulfilling a much-longed-for dream is that the experience must match – or better, exceed – expectations. At Archaeological Paths, our approach to luxury travel differs from other companies. We have changed the way the travel industry operates by offering unforgettable, unsurpassed, and unique experiences. Combined with our passion for history and exploration, this is one of the things that makes us distinct among tour companies. Our guests have exclusive access to exceptional sites. Imagine Luxor Temple, the Valley of the Kings, or the entire Giza Plateau open just for you. For most visitors, a distant viewing platform is as close to the Great Sphinx as they’ll get. With us, you can touch the Sphinx and stand between its paws as you watch the sunrise, a time when no one else is allowed at the site. You can enjoy a VIP tour of the Grand Egyptian Museum or private entry to the Great Pyramid of Khufu, including a visit to the Queen’s and Subterranean Chambers – both closed to the public. You’ll have special access to 19th-century palaces that are official residences of the Egyptian president. Now it’s time to take a closer look at what makes these experiences extraordinary. From Founder and CEO of Archaeological Paths, Grzegorz Popławski: “Egypt’s treasures and cultural heritage have fascinated people for centuries, and no one can tour Egypt quite like Archaeological Paths. I do believe that the name of this company should go down in history, written in gold, for its contribution to promoting the legacy of ancient Egypt.” The Great Sphinx Enclosure The Presidential Abdeen Palace Archaeological Paths’ guests are introduced to the latest discoveries at the Karnak Temple Complex figures include the world’s most famous archae “ EGYPT’S HIDDEN TREASURES WHAT WILL YOU EXPERIENCE WHEN TRAVELING WITH ARCHAEOLOGICAL PATHS? Archaeological Paths promises to completely change the way visitors explore the country as the company benefits from an unparalleled level of access. Archaeological Paths takes you where the general public can’t go, in the company of the world’s foremost archaeologists. And, in true royal style, all of this is paired with stays at former palaces, cruises on luxurious ships, and meals at the most exquisite local restaurants. exclusive access to the site before its official — Dr. Zahi Hawass the world’s most famous archaeologist
of fulfilling a much-longed-for dream is that the Grzegorz Popławski: Pristine colors in Wahtye’s tomb Tomb of Wahtye Another feature of our tours – not offered by any other company – is that we invite our guests to meet with individuals who shape history. Hearing from these knowledgeable experts is an experience like no other. These figures include the world’s most famous archaeologist, Dr. Zahi Hawass, and Egypt’s SecretaryGeneral of the Supreme Council of Antiquities, Dr. Mostafa Waziri, presently responsible for all antiquities and archaeological sites in Egypt. There is no one better equipped to tell you about the most recent discoveries. With us, you’ll visit active excavation sites such as Taposiris Magna, the possible resting place of Cleopatra, the last queen of Egypt, or the Tombs of the Pyramid Builders at Giza. This site entirely changed the established understanding of how the pyramids were built. Imagine visiting this place in the company of the very person who discovered it, giving you unrivaled insight into Egypt’s ancient past. In addition to special access to some of the most iconic archaeological sites in Egypt already included in our tours’ itineraries, there are always some surprises in store for our guests. Now you can be a part of Archaeological Paths’ exclusive experiences! Book your tour today. www.archaeologicalpaths.com 917-724-2772 [email protected] as the company benefits from an unparalleled Dr. Mostafa Waziri shows the Temple of Khonsu, which is off-limits to the public For example, in 2021, one of the best years for Egypt in terms of new archaeological discoveries, Dr. Hawass found the “Lost Golden City” in Luxor. This is now regarded as the second most important Egyptian archaeological discovery after Tutankhamun’s tomb. Our guests were there before the discovery was even announced. Later that year, Egypt reopened the Southern Tomb of King Djoser at Saqqara after a 15-year renovation. Archaeological Paths’ guests were in for a real treat as they enjoyed exclusive access to the site before its official opening. And in December 2018, the 4,400-year-old tomb of Wahtye, a high-ranking priest, was discovered at Saqqara. The vibrant colors in the tomb were almost pristine, which even archaeologists found surprising. The moment we learned that a new tomb had been found, we knew our guests had to witness it. That very day, our guests, along with Dr. Waziri and Dr. Hawass, explored this tomb. Since then, Archaeological Paths is one of the only companies allowed to lead its guests there. Imagine being one of the very few people in the world who have had the opportunity to enter this ancient burial chamber. Taposiris Magna Temple We may take you to a tomb that was discovered literally a few days earlier or a temple that will remain closed to tourists for years to come. Don’t be surprised, then, when you are a part of a similar experience during your tour. With us, you can expect the unexpected! Opportunities like this make our itineraries the most exclusive and luxurious you can find. I always say that you might visit Egypt only once in your life, so you should have the richest experience possible and see things in the most intimate way. We want to create a trip filled with memories that will last a lifetime. Whenever you hear about a new discovery in Egypt, we are there, together with our guests, providing the best access not only to ancient sites but also to all of Egypt’s hidden treasures. ”
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CONTENTS COVER: LORADO/GETTY IMAGES. THIS PAGE: LIGHTPHOTO/GETTY IMAGES/ISTOCKPHOTO 24 34 Who Were the Vikings? Today’s popular notions of Norse seafarers hardly touch the surface of their true identity — or their influence around the globe and across the centuries. MOLLY GLICK & CODY COTTIER Invasive Eats These nine plants and animals cause billions of dollars of damage in the U.S. Luckily for the eco-minded, they’re also delicious. MARISA SLOAN SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2022 VOL. 43, NO. 5 Earth Is a Planet Too! As researchers strive to understand our solar system, there’s a perfect laboratory right under our feet. ALISON KLESMAN A Pod’s Bonds A rare interspecies adoption reveals sperm whale society is more sophisticated — and more playful — than previously thought. ASHLEY WARD 42 50 p. 24 SEP/OCT 2022 . DISCOVER 5
CLOCKWISE FROM TOP: ALEXIS ROSENFELD/1 OCEAN/UNESCO; JUKKA JANTUNEN/SHUTTERSTOCK; DAVID BUSTOS/NATIONAL PARK SERVICE CONTENTS Following in ancient footsteps, finding fonts for information retention, and assessing the future of artificial wombs. HOT SCIENCE p. 9 COLUMNS & DEPARTMENTS 7 EDITOR’S NOTE On the Menu Invasive species have tasty possibilities. 8 INBOX What’s at the center of a dinosaur-egg fossil? 20 VITAL SIGNS A Burning Question Chest pain, nausea and vomiting brought this grad student to the emergency room. Her evasive answers made it clear that this was no routine stomach problem. DOUGLAS G. ADLER 56 HISTORY LESSONS The First Global Vaccination Campaign How a military doctor and the king of Spain used orphans and arm-to-arm vaccination to fight smallpox. HANNAH SEO 62 PIECE OF MIND (Virtual) Reality Check My son’s social isolation prompted me to reconsider video games — and some dated research about their influence. CAREN CHESLER 66 #SCIENCEIRL Deep Coral A thriving mesophotic reef near Tahiti is one of the largest known to scientists. TIMOTHY MEINCH p. 66
SCIENCE THAT MATTERS ® STEPHEN C. GEORGE Editorial Director ELIZABETH M. WEBER Design Director EDITORIAL TIMOTHY MEINCH Features Editor ELISA R. NECKAR Production Editor ALEX ORLANDO Associate Editor MOLLY GLICK Assistant Editor MARISA SLOAN Assistant Editor SAM WALTERS Assistant Editor SAMANTHA HILL Editorial Assistant JASON P. DINH AAAS Mass Media Fellow Contributing Editors BRIDGET ALEX, TIM FOLGER, JONATHON KEATS, LINDA MARSA, KENNETH MILLER, STEVE NADIS, JULIE REHMEYER, DARLENE CAVALIER (special projects) DISCOVERMAGAZINE.COM ERIN BERGE Digital Editor MONICA CULL Assistant Digital Editor Contributors BRIDGET ALEX, ERIK KLEMETTI, JOSHUA RAPP LEARN, SCISTARTER, TOM YULSMAN ADVERTISING KRISTI RUMMEL Advertising Representative 608 435 6220 [email protected] KALMBACH MEDIA DAN HICKEY Chief Executive Officer CHRISTINE METCALF Chief Financial Officer NICOLE MCGUIRE Senior Vice President, Consumer Marketing STEPHEN C. GEORGE Vice President, Content BRIAN J. SCHMIDT Vice President, Operations SARAH A. HORNER Vice President, Human Resources LIZ RUNYON Circulation Director ANGELA COTEY Director of Digital Strategy MICHAEL SOLIDAY Director of Design & Production KATHY STEELE Retention Manager KIM REDMOND Single Copy Specialist SUBSCRIPTIONS Print + digital in the U.S., $37.95 for one year; in Canada, $44.95 for one year (U.S. funds only); includes GST, BN12271 3209 RT; other foreign countries, $51.95 for one year (U.S. funds only). CUSTOMER SALES & SERVICE 800 829 9132 Outside the U.S. and Canada: 903 636 1125 Customer Service: [email protected] EDITORIAL INQUIRIES [email protected] 21027 Crossroads Circle, Waukesha, WI 53186 For reprints, licensing, and permissions: PARS International at www.parsintl.com On the Menu During my years as a health and medical journalist, I once found myself in the unexpected role of editing a magazine devoted to healthy cooking. Each issue contained dozens of recipes, which all were tried by the staff, including me. Once or twice a week we’d gather in the test kitchen and sample whatever new dish was in the works. Not all of the food that came out of the kitchen made the cut — some of it looked and tasted supremely unappetizing. But I always looked forward to recipe-test days because you just never knew that you’d get served to you. Although I didn’t stay at that job very long, I thought about it a lot after reading “Invasive Eats,” which begins on page 34. When Assistant Editor Marisa Sloan first began writing this story, it never occurred to me that I could do my part against invasive species by simply eating them. What would my old test-kitchen comrades say if they were asked to prepare a dish of, say, fried murder hornets, with a side of kudzu? And that’s just two of the several invasive ingredients you’ll find in this inventive piece. Obviously, we don’t expect you all to try these dishes (unless you really want to!), but Marisa shares a novel way to look at a common and growing problem. In the U.S. alone, nearly 6,500 invasive species are thriving, posing a daunting ecological and economic challenge. DiscoverMagazine.com facebook.com/DiscoverMag twitter.com/DiscoverMag instagram.com/discover.magazine Stephen C. George, Editorial Director Feel free to send comments and questions to [email protected] CONNECT WITH US FROM TOP: POIROT55/SHUTTERSTOCK; SWEET MARSHMALLOW/SHUTTERSTOCK Even if you’d never try these dishes, we hope you enjoy devouring this story, as well as the others we’ve served up for you in this issue. My tenure as a food editor may have been at another magazine entirely, but I like to think of each issue of Discover as a recipe we prepare for you, spicing the meal with a variety of ingredients. Some items on the menu may not always be to your usual or preferred tastes, but we hope they still satisfy your appetite. What’s the most unusual thing you’ve ever eaten? (It doesn’t have to be one of the species in our story!) Email us at editorial@ discovermagazine. com with your answer. BY STEPHEN C. GEORGE EDITOR’S NOTE
8 DISCOVERMAGAZINE.COM INBOX This was a fun read; any time that my ignorance is challenged, my time is well spent. I learned several things about the importance of documentation and proof of origin along with custody control. The one thing that I didn’t learn was when one or more of these eggs are opened to science, what do you expect to learn? My guess is that answer depends on what you find beyond the visible. Richard Fyfe FEATURES EDITOR TIMOTHY MEINCH RESPONDS: Great question, with a complicated answer. As you guessed, what scientists expect to learn from Manning’s egg specimens depends on many factors, including what species they are analyzing. In this case, scanning the dinosaur embryos with a synchrotron (a massive particle accelerator with advanced X-ray capabilities) would likely reveal preserved soft tissues with detailed skin, muscles and cartilage. In fact, at least one of Manning’s eggs was analyzed with a synchrotron in France years ago in experiments that “went very well and the data are extremely good,” in the words of one scientist managing the facility. But ensuing legal issues and controversies about the specimen and the collaborators prevented those findings from being shared publicly — and generated such a fiasco that the scientist above prefers not to speak of the “lost for science” experiments. CRACKING THE EGG (“Waiting to Hatch,” Mar/Apr 2022) FROM TOP: MARK PETERMAN; DAN/CC BY-SA 4.0/WIKIMEDIA COMMONS ERRATA “In Search of the Nudibranch” (Mar/Apr 2022) was an informative and interesting article. However, it contains an academic error: Having taught invertebrate zoology for three decades, I can assure the readers that sponges do not have stinging cells. — David Voth I enjoyed “In Search of the Nudibranch,” but would like to point out that Elysia, which can self-decapitate, is not a nudibranch. It belongs to another clade of gastropods: the sacoglossa. — Jerry Villere AUTHOR ANDRIA GREENE RESPONDS: David and Jerry, thank you for the necessary corrections – I appreciate you both! We all need science-literate folks to hold us to the highest standards and keep us humble. As Jerry notes, Elysia does belong to gastropoda, superorder sacoglossa. Forgive me for grouping this sea slug with nudibranchs. And David is correct; sponges do not have stinging cells. I hope you also forgive my mistakes. IT’S ALIVE! (“Will Cryonically Frozen Bodies Ever Be Brought Back to Life?” Mar/Apr 2022) When working at the National Bureau of Standards Cryogenic Engineering Laboratory in Boulder, Colorado, around 1960, I witnessed the following: While doing an outdoor experiment, we had a 5- or 10-liter portable dewar (think large Thermos bottle) of liquid nitrogen with an open top. We went to lunch, forgetting to cover the dewar with its foil cap; when we returned, a very frozen grasshopper was floating on the surface of the liquid nitrogen. We poured the grasshopper out onto the ground. Twenty or 30 minutes later, we noticed that the frozen grasshopper began to move its legs. Five or 10 minutes after that, the grasshopper hopped away, probably never realizing what it had just experienced. W. Harry Probert A WEALTH OF CITIZEN SCIENCE (“Science by the People,” Mar/Apr 2022) Regarding citizen science, you should also refer people to Zooniverse.org, which has a host of projects that people can help with online: transcribing information from historical sources, analyzing data from telescopes and microscopes, identifying animals in camera-trap photos, and more. It certainly helped save my sanity during the pandemic! My favorites are the animal sites, which make me feel like I’m on safari in Africa, Australia, or wherever every day. They also have talk forums, so you can chat with other volunteers. Lisa Yount FROM THE EDITORS: Thanks for the suggestion, Lisa! We actually featured an article on Zooniverse in our April 2019 issue, written by Alison Klesman, senior associate editor at our sister magazine, Astronomy. Check it out here, and enjoy. Zooniverse Scan this code with your phone’s camera for more: A Citizen Science Success Story.
HOT SCIENCE SEP/OCT 2022 . DISCOVER 9 THE LATEST NEWS AND NOTES F0NTS, LEARNING AND MEMORY•EAVESDROPPING ANIMALS• WHY SINGERS ARE SO GOOD AT LANGUAGES•ARTIFICIAL WOMBS FOSSILIZED FOOTSTEPS Ancient humans — mainly children and teenagers — left these tracks along the muddy shoreline of a former lake between 21,000 and 23,000 years ago. That makes the 61 footprints, found in New Mexico’s White Sands National Park and reported in Science last year, the oldest known in North America. The finding is forcing some archaeologists to walk back by thousands of years long-standing estimates of when humans first ventured to the continent from Asia. In fact, by the time the next wave of migrants arrived, the descendants of these earliest Americans might still have been around to greet them. — MARISA SLOAN; IMAGES BY DAVID BUSTOS/NATIONAL PARK SERVICE
10 DISCOVERMAGAZINE.COM Although typography is overlooked by most of us (excluding design enthusiasts), it’s crucial in rendering texts legible, readable and appealing for audiences. Beyond the visual aspect, research shows that fonts play a significant role in the cognitive processes that transpire while we read. A font’s impact on the way you learn and retain information might be hard to notice consciously, but your brain is certainly tuned in. Perhaps surprisingly, hard-to-read fonts such as Bodoni, Comic Sans or Monotype Corsiva are better for retaining information than fonts like Arial or Times New Roman, according to some studies. Participants recalled more information from the material they read when it was presented in a font that was difficult to read, according to a 2010 study. “Difficulty can function as an alarm signal, giving the reader a sense that the task is challenging and will require mental effort,” says Daniel Oppenheimer, a professor of psychology at Carnegie Mellon University and one of the 2010 study authors. Additionally, slowing down the reading speed to deal with the disfluency may increase the likelihood of spotting errors in a text. Hard-to-read fonts, which make it harder to engage with a material but don’t actually distract the reader, therefore generate “desirable difficulty” — and the resulting cognitive burdens may improve performance because they require more mental effort. Font characteristics such as style, size and color play a role in information retention or recall, as well, because font design is vital to our familiarity — or unfamiliarity — with a given word, says Stephen Banham, a typography lecturer at RMIT University in Melbourne, Australia. Experiments have demonstrated a U-shape relationship between font size and memory: Largefont items may predict higher recall regardless of style, but very small font sizes can also introduce a desirable difficulty. A document’s specific method of formatting WHENEVER YOU read text, your brain processes the visual stimuli to create meaning and understand the content. Chances are, you don’t pay much attention to the way the information is presented — particularly the font choice. That’s because your main objective is reading comprehension, not aesthetics. information also makes an impact. Using font styles like bold or italics to indicate significance can also improve retention. That’s because people are better able to remember information they consider important, says Oppenheimer. Researchers found that bolded text has a higher recall than text in italic or regular styles, regardless of the font size. However, if an entire document is bolded, the emphasis is lost, and readers can no longer spot vital passages. — CARLA DELGADO HOT SCIENCE TEXT STYLES IMPACT IMPORTANT COGNITIVE PROCESSES AND CAN MAKE OR BREAK INFORMATION RETENTION. FROM TOP LEFT: ELENA MEDVEDEVA/GETTY IMAGES/ISTOCKPHOTO; STEPHEN BANHAM ET AL./RMIT UNIVERSITY Behavioral scientists at RMIT University created Sans Forgetica, a font built to invoke deeper processing. How Fonts Affect Learning and Memory HARD-TO-READ FONTS SUCH AS BODONI, COMIC SANS OR MONOTYPE CORSIVA ARE BETTER FOR RETAINING INFORMATION THAN FONTS LIKE ARIAL OR TIMES NEW ROMAN, ACCORDING TO SOME STUDIES. MONOTYPE CORSIVA COMIC SANS COMIC SANS BODONI HARD TO READ
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12 DISCOVERMAGAZINE.COM WHILE HUMANS may have perfected the art of eavesdropping — even at a great distance, if tapped phone lines or cyberattacks are any indication — they aren’t the only animals listening in to the conversations around them. Birds commonly eavesdrop on the alarm calls of other avian species to avoid danger, despite not fully understanding these “foreign languages,” or seeing the predator that triggered them in the first place. Wild superb fairywrens (pictured on the right) can be trained to flee from unfamiliar sounds in just a few days. Australian National University scientists achieved this by simultaneously broadcasting these noises with the alarm calls of fairywrens and other birds, which the territorial fairywrens quickly learned to associate with one another. But birds chatter when they feel safe from danger, too, and even land-loving animals can take advantage of this behavior. In a 2019 study examining Eastern gray squirrels found in public parks and residential areas of Ohio, scientists monitored the squirrels’ responses to a perceived threat — a recording of the red-tailed hawk — followed by either natural songbird chatter or ambient noise from the environment. After monitoring the behavior of each squirrel for three minutes, the researchers found that the critters spent far less time freezing, SHH! EAVESDROPPING ANIMALS MAY BE LISTENING looking up or fleeing if they’d also eavesdropped on the soothing sounds of the songbirds right after. IN ADDITION to ensuring their safety and guarding against danger, sometimes a little listening can also keep animals from going hungry. In Panama’s rainforests, more than a dozen species rely on almond trees as a primary food source. Yet the animals on the forest floor aren’t able to access this fruit until it falls — or is dropped by monkeys in the trees above. Biologists from the Natural History Museum of Denmark spent nine months in an island rainforest in the Panama Canal, observing as coatis (raccoonlike mammals), agoutis (giant yet lovable rodents) and other scavengers took advantage of monkeys’ wasteful tendency to drop food after just a few bites. The researchers attached GPS collars to a few dozen of the animals to track their movements; they also placed speakers, which played monkey sounds, and camera traps in the trees, as well as fruitfall traps beneath them to catch unripe almonds and record any passing coatis and agoutis. Their results, published last year in Biotropica, show that the grounded animals listen in on capuchin and spider monkeys to find out when and where they’re eating. As the monkeys are increasingly displaced from their local environments, typically due to hunting and deforestation, however, the entire ecosystem’s food chain may soon be put in jeopardy. Rasmus Havmøller, a postdoctoral researcher at the Natural History Museum of Denmark and co-author on the study, said in a press release that the findings are a testament to the animal kingdom’s closeknit ties: “Eavesdropping between species provides us with important knowledge about how much the disappearance of one species can impact an entire ecosystem.” — MARISA SLOAN EASTERN GRAY SQUIRRELS are known to listen in on the alarm calls of certain species of birds. HOT SCIENCE FROM TOP: LIGHTPOET/SHUTTERSTOCK; WRIGHT OUT THERE/SHUTTERSTOCK THROUGHOUT THE ANIMAL KINGDOM, CREATURES KEEP AN EAR OUT FOR VALUABLE INTEL — EVEN FROM DIFFERENT SPECIES.
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14 DISCOVERMAGAZINE.COM SINGERS SEEM to have a talent for foreign tongues — most notably when it comes to pronunciation and accent. That’s because, like parrots, they mimic what they hear. It’s something that Italian tenor Luciano Pavarotti, who couldn’t read music, did with his operatic singing. “The singer is the best with the accent,” says Susanne Reiterer, a neurolinguistics researcher at the University of Vienna in Austria. “A foreign accent is a piece of cake for them.” Since talking uses the same biological makeup as singing, says Reiterer, the two must be related both biologically and neurobiologically. “It’s almost like two sides of one coin.” Studies reveal that Heschl’s gyrus, a type of ridge on the brain’s surface that contains the primary auditory cortex, plays a significant role in both musical and language aptitude, especially when there are a higher number of gyri. Some researchers believe that, based on the structure of the brain, some people are simply born to be musicians. Rehearsing and training over time have an impact on the brain, as well, but Reiterer says biology also plays a leading role. “You can change a lot by rehearsing, but something is pre-given as well,” Reiterer adds. “It’s 50/50 genes and environment, and if you have a strong predisposition [musically], then you have more power basically in your auditory areas. You can discriminate sounds better.” In a study by Reiterer, published in Frontiers in Human Neuroscience in 2015, 96 participants categorized as instrumentalists, vocalists and non-musicians were tested for their abilities to imitate a language unknown to them — in this case, Hindi. Her team found vocalists had an advantage over instrumentalists, as they outperformed them in foreign language imitation, but both vocalists and instrumentalists outperformed non-musicians. This research also suggested that vocal motor training may allow singers to learn a language faster. What’s more, when children experience music early on in life, they’re able to achieve lifelong neuroplasticity, wrote Nina Kraus, a neuroscientist at Northwestern University, and co-author Travis WhiteSchwoch in a 2020 American Scientist study. The team also found that the more musicians play, the more they benefit: Speech-sound processing ability builds up across one’s lifespan. Musicians exhibited better attention, sharper working memory and better neural speech-sound processing as the number of practicing years increased. Even in the early 2000s, research suggested that long-term training in music and pitch recognition allows a person to better process the pitch patterns of a foreign language, a concept that Reiterer explored in a Annual Review of Applied Linguistics article published in 2021. Reiterer has also investigated how a person’s initial language aptitude develops due to factors such as biological maturing, sociocultural conditions and musical ability, to name a few, as reported in a 2021 study. The authors suggest that successful language learning depends on efficient connections between our speech and motor networks. “It’s the body that feels where I have to move my tongue,” Reiterer says. “And this feeling has a correlation in the brain, proprioception. That is the key to good pronunciation and the key to a good singer.” — AMANDA FLORIAN Why Singers Have a Knack for Language HOT SCIENCE ISAXAR/SHUTTERSTOCK MUSICIANS’ BRAINS SEEM TO EXCEL AT TACKLING NEW TONGUES, THANKS TO THEIR MASTERY OF SOUND. Rehearsing and training over time have an impact on the brain.
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16 DISCOVERMAGAZINE.COM HOT SCIENCE The idea of artificial wombs might conjure up scenes from movies like The Matrix, but it’s something humans have been mulling over for a century — English biologist J.B.S. Haldane coined the term ectogenesis (from the Greek for “outer” and “origin”) in 1923, and the concept played into the 1932 novel Brave New World. Scientists at Sweden’s Karolinska Institutet published diagrams on artificial wombs in 1958, and researchers in Japan and Korea made major strides in the following decades. SCIENCE FICTION often depicts babies grown in artificial wombs from start to finish, but in reality, much of the research focuses on later stages of development, when fetuses are on the brink of being able to survive outside the womb. That threshold has moved as neonatal medicine has improved, and ever-younger pre-term babies are surviving. Matt Kemp, the head of the perinatal research laboratories at Australia’s Women & Infants Research Foundation, along with his colleagues at Japan’s Tohoku University, works with fetal lambs, since their development resembles that of humans. The researchers have built artificial wombs that can support lambs that are developmentally equivalent to a 24-week-old human fetus, called EVE therapy. (There are no artificial womb studies involving human fetuses.) According to Kemp, the artificial wombs look “a bit like a wine bladder” — the plastic bags that line containers of boxed wine. But instead of containing a Zinfandel blend, these bags hold a liquid that mimics amniotic fluid, along with a hairless, pink lamb fetus about half the size of a smartphone, with tubes hooked up to its umbilical cord. While the set-up might look strange and futuristic, says Kemp, “essentially all you’re doing is oxygenating a very small fetus.” In utero, the fetus’s heart pumps deoxygenated blood into the placenta via the umbilical cord. While the fetal blood is in the placenta, it picks up oxygen from the parent’s blood. The newly oxygenated fetal blood then goes back through the umbilical cord to the fetus. If a fetus is born too early, ARTIFICIAL WOMBS: SCI-FI MEETS THE NICU SCIENTISTS ARE MOVING FORWARD WITH ANIMAL TRIALS THAT COULD SOMEDAY HELP HUMANS. ONDROM/SHUTTERSTOCK IT SOUNDS LIKE something out of science fiction: fetuses suspended in fluid-filled transparent bags, their blood flowing through a network of tubes hooked up to machines. But it’s not a speculative look at a dark future — research into artificial wombs is already underway, as a means of hopefully one day saving babies born too soon.
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18 DISCOVERMAGAZINE.COM HOT SCIENCE WOMEN AND INFANTS RESEARCH FOUNDATION its small, stiff lungs aren’t yet able to take up oxygen from the air. That’s where artificial uteruses might someday come in. In the sheep trials, the fetus’s heart pumps deoxygenated blood through a tube in its umbilical cord to a machine that oxygenates it. The oxygen-rich blood then flows back into the fetus’s body through another tube in the umbilical cord. In lambs, the technology has been able to keep the fetus alive through the risky developmental stage when the lungs aren’t yet strong enough to go on a ventilator — the 23- to 24-week mark in humans. “It is a hugely important point that we do not intend to challenge the currently accepted standard for a viable infant,” says Emily Partridge, a researcher at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, in a video about her and her colleagues’ work on artificial wombs for lamb fetuses. “The challenging age that we’re trying to offset is that 23- to 24-week baby who is faced with such a challenge of adapting to life outside of the uterus, on dry land.” Other researchers are working at the other end of the developmental spectrum, like Jacob Hanna’s team at Israel’s Weizmann Institute. They focus on the earliest stages of embryonic development, when organs first form. Again, no human embryos are involved in the research — Hanna and his team work with mice. In March 2021, Hanna and his colleagues announced that they’d raised mouse embryos about a third of the way through gestation outside of a uterus. He says of the time gap between his research and that of his colleagues working with later-term lamb fetuses: “The question is, with these two types of research, which are on both ends, will they ever meet?” Kemp is skeptical that the two disciplines will be bridged any time soon — he says that the challenges of complete ectogenesis from start to finish as opposed to just focusing on helping a fetus that’s already largely formed, is “sort of like saying, ‘Well, you’ve built an airplane, what’s stopping you from building a rocketship to Mars?’ ” He says that unless there are researchers out there “sitting on an Aladdin’s cave of data,” he can’t see ectogenesis moving into clinical use for humans within the next decade. EVEN IF SCIENTISTS someday do find a way to grow babies in an artificial womb from start to finish, there’s still the lingering question: Should we? The concept has advocates who hope that an alternative to biological pregnancy could help people without uteruses have children or might eliminate some of the inequality associated with motherhood. But Chloe Romanis, a professor of biolaw at Durham University, is more cautious, and not necessarily for the dystopian reasons sci-fi warns against. She notes that shifting boundaries of fetus viability might call abortion rights into question, and that artificial wombs might not be accessible to the people who need them most. “We know that premature delivery is associated with stress in pregnancy. We also know that it’s structurally associated with being poor, and also being discriminated against,” says Romanis. With a treatment as wildly expensive as an artificial uterus is likely to be, according to researchers like Kemp, Romanis stresses the importance of making sure that poor people and people of color get to reap the benefits of these technologies. Kemp agrees that while artificial wombs might one day save the lives of premature babies, they’re not a panacea to the inequality surrounding childbirth and childrearing: “If you want to improve reproductive and gender equality, you need to fund public health education programs. Those give you a much better return on investment than fancy technology.” — KATE GOLEMBIEWSKI If a fetus is born too early, its lungs aren’t yet able to take up oxygen from the air. Artificial Womb EVE Therapy IN: Sterilized artificial amniotic fluid OUT: Artificial amniotic fluid to sterilization device INFUSIONS INCLUDE: • lipids • antibiotics • amino acids • proteins • glucose • vasodilators
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VITAL SIGNS 20 DISCOVERMAGAZINE.COM BY DOUGLAS G. ADLER A Burning Question CHEST PAIN, NAUSEA AND VOMITING BROUGHT THIS GRAD STUDENT TO THE EMERGENCY ROOM. HER EVASIVE ANSWERS MADE IT CLEAR THAT THIS WAS NO ROUTINE STOMACH PROBLEM. But as soon as I saw her, I knew something unusual was going on with Allison. llison came to the emergency department late one morning complaining of intractable chest pain, nausea and vomiting. A 23-year-old graduate student, Allison was halfway through a Ph.D. program in molecular biology. Initially thinking she was having a heart attack, the ED physician obtained an electrocardiogram and a chest X-ray, both of which came back normal. Blood tests looking for signs of a drug overdose had also come back negative. With cardiac distress ruled out, the next symptoms to address were the nausea and vomiting. Thinking she may be suffering from an ulcer, the ED physician asked me to come down to evaluate the patient. Nausea and vomiting are common complaints, usually related to gastrointestinal infections like food poisoning and rotavirus, among other causes. But as soon as I saw her, I knew that something unusual was going on with Allison. She KELLIE JAEGER/DISCOVER was clearly in distress and writhing on a stretcher. She looked like she couldn’t get comfortable in any position. A quick glance at the monitor next to her bedside showed her heart rate was 120 beats per minute, a sign of an acute medical problem. I introduced myself, and we began to talk. “When did this start?” I asked. “A while ago,” she told me, shrugging. “What do you think triggered this?” “I’m not sure,” she said with a grimace. I pressed her a bit. “Something you ate?” “Maybe,” she said. I noticed that Allison’s answers were both vague and unhelpful, and when we were talking, she did not make eye contact with me and looked at the floor. In the silent minutes that followed, she sat up a bit and spat a mouthful of saliva into a paper cup, which I had not previously noticed, by her bedside. Getting a bad feeling, I also noticed for the first time that the front of her gown was damp from drool. Lowering my voice to a whisper, I leaned in a bit closer and asked, “Allison, did you drink something that’s not meant to be swallowed? Something from under the sink, or the bathroom, perhaps?” Her eyes widening, Allison nodded slowly. Nodding back at her, I could suddenly feel my own pulse start to rise. I made an educated guess: “Was it drain cleaner?” Allison started to cry and, looking at her hands, whispered, “Yes,” between sobs. Now we had our answer; Allison was suffering from a caustic ingestion. INGESTION OF caustic substances — most commonly cleaning products, pesticides, and other chemicals — happens more often than you might think. In children, the ingestion of these agents is usually accidental, but in adults, especially young adults, these events are almost always intentional. Sometimes when people get extremely bad news or are very upset emotionally, they will attempt to commit suicide in an impulsive manner. In that situation, they might reach for the first toxic thing they can find and drink it — usually, substances like household cleaners or other chemicals. Almost all commercial drain cleaners
T his story breaks my heart every time. Allegedly, just two years after the discovery of tanzanite in 1967, a Maasai tribesman knocked on the door of a gem cutter’s office in Nairobi. The Maasai had brought along an enormous chunk of tanzanite and he was looking to sell. His asking price? Fifty dollars. But the gem cutter was suspicious and assumed that a stone so large could only be glass. The cutter told the tribesman, no thanks, and sent him on his way. Huge mistake. It turns out that the gem was genuine and would have easily dwarfed the world’s largest cut tanzanite at the time. Based on common pricing, that “chunk” could have been worth close to $3,000,000! The tanzanite gem cutter missed his chance to hit the jeweler’s jackpot ... and make history. Would you have made the same mistake then? Will you make it today? In the decades since its discovery, tanzanite has become one of the world’s most coveted gemstones. Found in only one remote place on Earth (in Tanzania’s Merelani Hills, in the shadow of Mount Kilimanjaro), the precious purple stone is 1,000 times rarer than diamonds. Luxury retailers have been quick to sound the alarm, warning that supplies of tanzanite will not last forever. And in this case, they’re right. Once the last purple gem is pulled from the Earth, that’s it. No more tanzanite. Most believe that we only have a twenty year supply left, which is why it’s so amazing for us to offer this incredible price break. Some retailers along Fifth Avenue are more than happy to charge you outrageous prices for this rarity. Not Stauer. Staying true to our contrarian nature, we’ve decided to lower the price of one of the world’s rarest and most popular gemstones. This stunning two-total carat Sunburst Tanzanite Ring features marquise-cut gems set dramatically in gorgeous sterling silver. Each facet sparkles with the distinct violet-blue hue of the precious stones. But we don’t stop there. While supplies last, we’ll include these tanzanite studs FREE with your purchase of the ring — a $99 value! Limited Availability. We only have 1200, 954 left for this ad only. Of course, your satisfaction is 100% guaranteed. If you are not completely aglow with the Sunburst Tanzanite Ring, send it back within 30 days for a complete refund of the item price. But, please don’t wait, our supply is dropping rapidly. Jewelry Specifi cations: • 2 ctw genuine tanzanite set in .925 sterling silver setting; whole sizes 5–10 Sunburst Tanzanite Ring (2 ctw) $349 $79* + S&P Save $270 Plus FREE Tanzanite Studs (½ ctw) with your purchase of the Sunburst Tanzanite Ring — a $99 value! * Special price only for customers using the offer code. Stvuer, 545p5 Southcross Drive W., Ste 555, Dept. TZR67p-52, Burnsville, MN 55337 www.stauer.com Stauer® | AFFORD THE EXTRAORDINARY ® African Gem Cutter Makes $2,689,000 Mistake... Will You? 1-800-333-2045 Your Offer Code: TZR670-12 “The most important gemstone discovery in over 2,000 years.” — Henry Platt, former president and chairman of Tiffany & Company “This ring is incredibly beautiful — the pictures do not do it justice! ...well worth the price.” — K. M., Palm Coast, FL $79 Stauer ® Impossible Price ONLY EXCLUSIVE FREE Tanzanite Stud Earrings -a $99 valuewith your purchase of the Sunburst Tanzanite Ring
VITAL SIGNS 22 DISCOVERMAGAZINE.COM following an ingestion of acid.) Either way, ingesting an agent of the opposite pH would only cause more discomfort and tissue injury. Anti-inflammatory agents such as steroids have been tried in the past by physicians with patients in similar circumstances, but did not conclusively benefit the patients. Other treatments used in some types of poisoning, like ingesting activated charcoal, don’t usually help much, either. Allison was admitted to the intensive care unit for close observation after being evaluated. She was hydrated vigorously with intravenous fluids and not allowed to eat or drink. The benefit of antibiotics — to reduce the risk of infection — and acid-blocking agents such as omeprazole in caustic ingestion cases is unclear. But, given the severity of the injury, Allison was treated with both. Over the next two weeks, and on several subsequent endoscopic exams I performed, the linings of her esophagus and stomach slowly began to heal. Once these organs were on the road to recovery, Allison was transferred to an inpatient psychiatric hospital. FOLLOWING A LYE ingestion, patients are at risk for several long-term troubles. The most common problem is the formation of narrow areas in the esophagus that make it hard to swallow. These narrow areas, known as strictures, can arise as part of the natural healing process and are composed of dense scar tissue that can be very difficult to treat. Some patients develop such severe strictures that they lose the ability to swallow and need to receive nourishment through feeding tubes or, in rare cases, have their entire esophagus removed. Patients who ingest lye also are at increased risk of developing esophageal cancer during their lifetime. A few weeks later, I saw Allison for a follow-up. She was out of the hospital and doing well, both from a swallowing point of view and emotionally. Fortunately, she did not appear to have developed any strictures and was making progress in therapy working with a counselor. A single decision on a bad day could have ended her life, but at least now she was headed in the right direction. D Douglas G. Adler is a gastroenterologist and director of the Center for Advanced Therapeutic Endoscopy in Denver. The cases described in Vital Signs are real, but names and certain details have been changed. contain the same main ingredient: sodium hydroxide, or lye. Sodium hydroxide is a potent alkali agent, the chemical opposite of an acid. Sodium hydroxide and other related alkali agents can literally dissolve living tissue and produce intense chemical burns. Interestingly, people tend to swallow alkali agents more commonly simply because they can — as in, they can literally get them down their throats. In general, basic chemicals are easier to ingest than acids, as acids are more caustic on contact and cause people to spit them out before they can be swallowed. Drooling is common after caustic ingestions; in Allison’s case, her spitting into a cup is what ultimately tipped me off. THROUGH TEARS, Allison told me that she had awakened this morning to a text message from her boyfriend telling her he had found someone else and that their relationship was over. She was under the impression that they were soon to be engaged and was completely blindsided. Alone in her apartment after an hour of intense crying, Allison found herself on the kitchen floor, rummaging through the bottles under the sink. After deciding she wanted to die, she took five large swallows from an old container of liquid drain cleaner. Within minutes, Allison felt extremely ill and started to have terrible chest pain as her esophagus began to burn. Soon after, she was gagging and heaving uncontrollably. Suddenly terrified, she quickly walked the few blocks to the ED of our hospital. Once she arrived, despite her distress, she was incredibly embarrassed by what she had done and feigned ignorance of the cause of her troubles. A little while later, I performed an upper endoscopy on Allison and found evidence of severe chemical burns throughout her esophagus, with similar, although less intense, findings in her stomach. Luckily, her esophagus had not been perforated and her vocal cords were uninjured. Sometimes, patients with caustic ingestions burn their vocal cords and airway and require mechanical ventilation due to damage to their lungs. Unfortunately, there is no antidote for patients following a caustic ingestion. While it seems intuitive that perhaps swallowing acid after an alkali ingestion could “neutralize” the offending agent, such is not the case. (Nor is the opposite true KELLIE JAEGER/DISCOVER After an hour of intense crying, Allison found herself on the kitchen floor, rummaging through the bottles under the sink.
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TODAY’S POPULAR NOTIONS OF NORSE SEAFARERS HARDLY TOUCH THE SURFACE OF THEIR TRUE IDENTITY — OR THEIR INFLUENCE AROUND THE GLOBE AND ACROSS THE CENTURIES. Viking people (or Norsemen) have long been portrayed as cruel warriors whose way of life included little more than pillaging and plundering. To be fair, they did engage in plenty of raiding: From A.D. 800 to the 11th century, many Scandinavians departed what we now know as Norway, Sweden and Denmark in search of riches. Throughout much of Europe and as far as modern-day Russia, Iceland and North America, the nomadic sailors engaged in trade, exploration and war. But the Vikings also spent extended periods in foreign locales, leaving lasting marks of a rich culture that modern depictions often overlook. Marauders, brutes, barbarians: The fabled WHO WERE THE COVER STORY 24 DISCOVERMAGAZINE.COM
BOLD BUT perhaps not quite as bloodthirsty as legends (or pop culture) would have you think, Vikings were also great explorers and settlers.
inland, or the “land of wine,” isn’t listed on any modern map. A thousand years ago, however, it served as the stage for a seminal moment in world history. Icelandic sagas record it as the place where, 500 years before Christopher Columbus ever sailed a ship, the Vikings became the first Europeans to set foot in the so-called “New World,” even building a short-lived settlement. By the late A.D. 980s, these Norse seafarers had already established colonies in Iceland and Greenland, the Atlantic steppingstones that brought them within range of the Canadian coast. From there, according to the oral reports of the time (written down two centuries later in The Saga of the Greenlanders and The Saga of Erik the Red), the Vikings stumbled upon North America around A.D. 1000. Over the next few decades, they made several expeditions to this newto-them world. They built homes, harvested resources, traded — and clashed — with the Native peoples. Then, as quickly as they arrived, they abandoned Vinland. The two accounts often differ. In The Saga of the Greenlanders, after the accidental sighting of unknown western lands, Leif Eriksson explores three distinct regions of Canada: Helluland, or “land of flat stones,” which was probably the barren Baffin Island; Markland, or “land of forests,” which was likely located A.D. 793 First recorded Viking raid in England at Lindisfarne monastery. Viking Age begins. 834 The Oseberg Viking ship is buried at what later becomes Norway’s bestpreserved ship burial site. 841 Norse Viking settlers found Dublin. C. 860 Vikings attack Pisa, Italy. 862 As Francia’s defense increases in Western Europe, Viking forces focus attacks on England. 866 During the time of the Great Army, Danish Vikings take York in the north of England and establish a kingdom. 872 Harald I claims kingship of Norway. A TIMELINE OF TRAVEL AND TERROR PREVIOUS PAGE: LORADO/GETTY IMAGES. THIS PAGE: LIGHTPHOTO/GETTY IMAGES/ISTOCKPHOTO
ICONS, BELOW: MORE VECTOR/SHUTTERSTOCK. MAP: KELLIE JAEGER/DISCOVER along the Labrador coast; and Vinland, a warm region in what is now the province of Newfoundland where Eriksson and a small crew wintered. In The Saga of Erik the Red, Eriksson is portrayed as the accidental discoverer of Vinland, and an Icelandic merchant named Thorfinn Karlsefni is its explorer. Details aside, we now know these tales are at least broadly true: The Vikings did venture to North America in roughly the timeline the sagas describe, becoming the first people to bridge the world’s oldest cultural divide. FOR CENTURIES, scholars lumped Vinland together with other fabled realms, like Atlantis or Avalon. But archaeologists kept looking, and the search paid off in 1960 when Anne Stine Ingstad and Helge Ingstad of Norway excavated a series of earthen structures located on Newfoundland’s northern edge, near the entrance to the Gulf of St. Lawrence. The site, L’Anse aux Meadows, proved to be of Norse origin. To date, it’s the only verified Viking settlement on the continent. It consists of eight timber-frame buildings with thick walls of sod, built in the same style as Viking settlements in Greenland and Iceland. Some were dwellings, others forges and workshops. The digs uncovered evidence of iron production and ship repair, among other activities. Experts estimate that this cluster of homes and workshops could have supported 70 to 90 people year-round, and likely took at least two months to construct. Birgitta Wallace, a Swedish-Canadian archaeologist who worked with the Ingstads and conducted further excavations for Parks Canada in the 1970s, is careful to note that there’s more to Vinland than this outpost. “Many people make the mistake of thinking that Vinland is just a point on the map,” she says, “but it’s a land, the same as Greenland [or] Iceland. It means a big area.” The first part of the word explains why this vast area so enticed the Vikings — it was flush with wild grapes, the key ingredient in wine, which didn’t grow anywhere near their desolate homeland. “A chieftain’s power in Norse society was based primarily on how he could show off and be very impressive,” Wallace says. “Having wine would impress the hell out of anybody, because it was so rare.” According to The Saga of the Greenlanders, Eriksson loaded his ship with grapes during his 911 Treaty grants the Vikings a region of France known as Normandy, “land of the Northmen.” C. 982 Erik the Red arrives in Greenland. As many as 3,000 Vikings may have farmed here. 995 Olaf I assumes the Norwegian throne and attempts to Christianize the kingdom. C. 1004 Thorfinn Karlsefni journeys to Vinland/ North America to start a colony (later abandoned). 1013 Danes led by Sweyn Forkbeard conquer the kingdom of England; his son and grandson will rule for nearly 30 more years. 1050 The city of Kristiania — later renamed Oslo — is founded in Norway. 1066 Battle of Stamford Bridge. Anglo-Saxon King Harold is victorious, but later defeated by Norman king William the Conqueror. Viking era ends. Atlantic Ocean Dublin Vinland Greenland Iceland Faroer Scandinavia Volga Staraya Ladoga Novgorod Miklagard Normandy York Kiev Shetland 839 941 880 882 854 820 860 911 844 820 793 795 982 1000 NEWFOUNDLAND’S L’Anse aux Meadows is the only verified Viking settlement in North America, but as the map at right shows, Norse explorers ranged (and raided) widely. VIKING VOYAGES
COURTESY OF THE AUTHORS (3) 28 DISCOVERMAGAZINE.COM first voyage. He and his followers were also drawn to the timber, since Greenland has virtually no trees. GIVEN THE LONG-TERM architecture at L’Anse aux Meadows and the bounty surrounding it, Wallace says, “I think this was a place they intended to use for a long time. But according to the archaeological evidence, they didn’t.” That, too, fits with the sagas — the Vikings seem to have stayed at L’Anse aux Meadows for a few decades at most, then returned to Greenland. For such a hardy culture that was capable of surviving the harsh northern climate, it may seem strange that they failed in this relatively hospitable place. But experts have a few hypotheses to explain this. One theory claims that they were simply driven out by the Native peoples (whom they called Skraelings) — a problem they never faced in uninhabited Greenland and Iceland. Indeed, this is the reason given by The Saga of Erik the Red. Though trade between the two groups began amicably, the situation quickly devolved, and it seems the Vikings more or less fled in “a great shower of missiles.” After a deadly skirmish with the Natives, the saga states, they “were now of the opinion that though the land might be choice and good, there would be always war and terror overhanging them, from those who dwelt there before them.” Of all the artifacts at L’Anse aux Meadows, only one may speak to the relations between Vikings and Native Americans: a single arrowhead lodged in the wall of a house. Of course, it’s impossible to say whether it arrived there directly via bow, or whether it already existed within a piece of sod the Vikings used in building the house. More likely, a combination of factors forced the Vikings to sail back from whence they came. Wallace notes that their home base in Greenland was meager itself, and it may have been unsustainable to use a far-flung colony of just a few hundred to populate an even farther-flung colony. Climatic evidence has suggested their retreat also coincided with a cold snap and, likely, an advance of sea ice, making it difficult to travel between Greenland and Vinland. Meanwhile, lake sediment samples collected near a former Norse farm hint that droughts prompted their sudden departure, according to a March 2022 Science Advances study. Either way, they were gathering resources from a location nearly as far from Greenland as Greenland was from Europe, their main source of trade. Without the advantage of proximity, why reinvent the supply chain? L’ANSE AUX MEADOWS, the only proof we’ve discovered that Vikings reached North America, matches the description of Straumfjord, the year-round settlement that, according to The Saga of Erik the Red, the Vikings used as a launching point for deeper journeys into Vinland. But if the saga rings true — and there’s no reason to think it doesn’t, broadly speaking — the Vikings built a second settlement — and it remains undiscovered. Hóp (pronounced “hope”) was a seasonal site located WHAT RECENT TECHNOLOGICAL DEVELOPMENTS GUIDED YOUR RESEARCH? JR: The greatest impact has come about through metal detecting, which isn’t a technology that archaeologists have traditionally used. Metal detectorists often know far more about where the Viking sites are than most archaeologists. Most of these sites are invisible on the surface; at Torksey, it was just sort of six empty fields. DH: We’ve done various types of petrographic analysis of the pottery produced in Torksey, … when you take little slices out of the pot and look at its fine-grained makeup under a microscope. We were able to make links with pottery industries on the [European] continent, in regions of northern France in the low countries where Viking army members had been before they came to England, and realized where the origins of that industry came from. HOW THE VIKINGS TRANSFORMED ENGLAND Although the Vikings didn’t reach the “New World” until nearly the turn of the first millennium A.D., they had already made their presence felt in the British Isles, beginning with sporadic raids in the eighth century and continuing in the ninth century with the arrival of a massive force — the Great Army — that occupied parts of England for over a decade. Archaeologists Julian Richards and Dawn Hadley, authors of the book The Viking Great Army and the Making of England (Thames & Hudson, 2021), discuss why the Vikings’ protracted stay in Britain — between A.D. 865 and 878 — transformed both medieval Norse culture and English life as we know it. Their research pieces together previous finds, including a wealth of objects recovered at the Great Army camp at Torksey in eastern England. THE NORSE ARMY’S EXTENDED RESIDENCE LEFT A PERMANENT MARK ON BRITISH LIFE. VIKINGS! Scan this code for more: Why Did Greenland’s Norse Colonies Mysteriously Vanish?
HOW DID THE VIKINGS’ TIME IN ENGLAND DIFFER FROM THEIR OTHER TRAVELS? DH: Vikings seem to respond variably to the circumstances in which they find themselves. The Viking Great Army was minting coins [in England], but we don’t see that in Ireland, Wales or Scotland at this time because Indigenous rulers there didn’t use coinages. WHY WERE THE TORKSEY CAMP FINDINGS PARTICULARLY IMPORTANT FOR THIS BOOK, AND OUR BROADER UNDERSTANDING OF THE VIKINGS? JR: There’d been a view among some historians that the scale of the Viking Great Army had been exaggerated in the written sources [by Anglo-Saxon clerics] that we had. The significance of Torksey is on two levels: It’s partly the scale of the camp, over 50 hectares, so it was a massive order of magnitude. … The other aspect is the types of activities going on, that it wasn’t just raiding. There was a lot of trading manufacture going on, and probably a presence of women and children in the camp. JR: It demonstrates the remarkable amount of wealth that must have been around in the form of gold and silver. It throws a very different light on the economy at the time. WHAT HAS YOUR RESEARCH FOR THIS BOOK REVEALED ABOUT THE VIKINGS’ BROADER TRADE NETWORKS? DH: It shows the interconnectedness of Viking trading networks. … The silver [found at Torksey] had been acquired from the Arabic world, perhaps in exchange for furs, amber or slaves, and made its way, presumably, through the trading networks of the Russian river system. JR: One interesting factor is the speed at which some of these items were traveling. We’ve got dirhams [silver coins] which we know were minted in Asia and the Middle East. The Viking Great Army arrived in England in [A.D.] 865. They’re indicating continuing connections. It’s not as if all that silver arrived with them. HOW DID THE VIKINGS INFLUENCE THE GROWTH OF INDUSTRY IN ENGLAND? JR: Some of the later industrial developments, particularly metalworking, that had been happening in the urban centers were clearly using [Viking] traditions. Our main evidence comes in the form of pottery because it survived so well archaeologically. Before the arrival of the Viking army in the ninth century, pottery-making in AngloSaxon England tended to be localized, handmade and fairly crude. … It can’t be coincidence that a series of pottery industries appear in the late ninth and early 10th century in a number of English towns, almost all places that we know were visited by the Vikings. Torksey is the great example: We have this winter camp and apparently within a decade of that known date, this major pottery industry develops. — MOLLY GLICK farther south, where the Vikings collected timber and grapes in the summer. Archaeologists have found no sign of it, but the sagas offer a few clues: Besides grapes, it was rich in salmon, and the Natives made boats of animal hide. Based on those criteria, Wallace is confident Hóp was somewhere in modern-day eastern New Brunswick, likely in the area around Miramichi and Chaleur Bay. It’s the northernmost extent of the wild grape range, along with the butternut trees whose wood has been found at L’Anse aux Meadows. Other researchers have proposed locations along the Atlantic seaboard, as far south as Maine, Boston and New York. But wherever Hóp once stood, Wallace doubts any trace remains. As a light, temporary settlement, it likely wasn’t sturdy enough to be detectable centuries later. In 2016, Sarah Parcak, a University of Alabama archaeologist who uses satellite imagery to locate buried structures, discovered what seemed like a promising lead at Point Rosee on the southwest end of Newfoundland. While digging, her team found iron, but it turned out to be the kind that develops naturally in bogs, rather than being smelted. Since then, the search hasn’t brought any progress. So, Wallace argues, Hóp may continue to elude us. “I think it would be extremely hard to find any kind of physical evidence,” she says. “And that’s a pity, but I certainly wouldn’t pay for an excavation.” Nevertheless, archaeologists — amateur and professional — are on the lookout, especially in New Brunswick and Nova Scotia. And whatever future searches do or don’t reveal about the Norse in North America, one thing is certain: “People love Vikings,” Wallace says, adding that the subject is still ripe for research. Fifty years after she began work at L’Anse aux Meadows, she still keeps up on all the latest scholarly articles. “Every day I find one that is absolutely worth reading.” — CODY COTTIER SEP/OCT 2022 . DISCOVER 29 HVALSEY CHURCH, Greenland, represents some of the best preserved ruins of a Norse settlement. Other Viking outposts, likely built of less sturdy materials, have been harder to find. JRPOL/WIKIMEDIA COMMONS
VIKINGS EMPLOYED impressive handiwork in their garments, even embroidering them with silk, as shown in these reconstructions (based on samples from high-status graves).
SEP/OCT 2022 . DISCOVER 31 OPPOSITE PAGE: ROBERTO FORTUNA/NATIONAL MUSEUM OF DENMARK. THIS PAGE: SOFIE KRAFFT/MUSEUM OF CULTURAL HISTORY/UNIVERSITY OF OSLO ovies and TV shows have popularized the view of Scandinavia’s Vikings as grimy combatants. In the 1999 film The 13th Warrior, for example, you’ll find plenty who look like they could use a bath. The stereotype of grubby Vikings (and the movie’s plot) stems from an account by Arab traveler Ahmad ibn Fadlan, who may have exaggerated the “dirty” appearance of Swedish Vikings to entertain readers. And the pagan warriors’ attacks on Christian monasteries no doubt cemented their barbarous reputation. Meanwhile, screen depictions like Netflix’s The Last Kingdom series have gone too far in the other direction and overstate the opulence of the Vikings with highly decorated costumes. In reality, most Vikings were Middle Ages farmers who wore simple, durable clothing, says Ulla Mannering, an archaeologist who researches North European textiles and costumes at the National Museum of Denmark. And while a select few enjoyed more ritzy lifestyles and engaged in ferocious battles and exciting trades abroad, even their appearances would seem fairly plain to today’s audiences. “I don't think the Viking Age or prehistory itself was particularly fancy,” Mannering says. “It would probably not satisfy our modern eye.” Here’s what we know (and don’t) about Norseman clothing, grooming and accessories. WHILE COSTUMES may look extravagant on screen, they don’t always align with historical evidence. Most knowledge of Viking clothing comes from decayed, fragmented samples found in graves and bogs, but researchers do have a general sense of their style. Composed mostly of flax and wool, the clothing likely involved very basic shapes. Hollywood has made the mistake of including modern-looking knitwear, while recovered garments are far coarser than today’s weavings. Unlike current fast fashion, these pieces were built to last. Garments were probably passed down from high-class wearers to lower-class counterparts, Mannering says — or they were simply stolen and repurposed. Most women stuck to thick, strapstyle dresses topped with a sturdy cloak. Men liked to layer, too, often with a long tunic and trousers under cloaks. This was helpful when heat sources were scarce, Mannering says, and a layer of breathable linen under wool provided warmth while preventing excessive sweating. As for footwear, Vikings may have donned leather boots that were fairly easy to manufacture, but it isn’t clear how often they actually wore these shoes (which may have been quite slippery on the grass and dirt). The modest look held up regardless of class, as proven by a recent garment reconstruction from two 10th-century high-status individuals’ graves in Denmark. The embroidery in these findings were highly unusual, Mannering says, even for expensive clothing; it might have been recycled from a wall hanging. Overall, be wary when shows like the History Channel’s Vikings suggests that the most affluent Vikings strutted around with detailed stitching and tight, complex clothing patterns. STRIPS OF SILK, found in the remains of the Oseburg ship burial mound, may have been purchased from Persia.
CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT: ELLEN C. HOLTE/MUSEUM OF CULTURAL HISTORY/ UNIVERSITY OF OSLO; ROBERTO FORTUNA/NATIONAL MUSEUM OF DENMARK; PRINT COLLECTOR/GETTY IMAGES; ROGER H. WHITE AND MARTIN COOPER (2) The Scandinavians applied fine craftsmanship to their coats and cloaks, some of which were made of furs hunted from far northern regions, and were considered lavish. “There’s a clash in visuals because we have an idea that if you are a tough Viking, you will look even tougher with a skin thrown over your shoulder,” Mannering says. “But Vikings, with the capacity of wearing a real fur garment, would never just have a half-made item like that.” Unfortunately, it’s unclear exactly what colors the Vikings wore. We have proof of red, blue and yellow dyes (which could also be used use to make green and purple), Mannering says. But researchers aren’t sure how commonly used each was and how they were sourced. Some unearthed textiles no longer carry traces of dye, which complicates the mystery. And while some portrayals give the impression that the Viking population rejected baths, evidence shows that they likely prioritized hygiene. Archaeologists have uncovered artifacts like combs, razors, tweezers and ear spoons to clean earwax. The Vikings also concocted an early form of shampoo. ACCORDING TO both written sources and archaeological finds, Vikings were big on accessories. Many wore belts equipped with handy tools for either expeditions or farming. They were also keen on bling, sporting necklaces and arm rings made of wood, glass and gold. In their burials, well-traveled Vikings made sure to flaunt jewelry brought from places like North Africa, the Middle East and India. — M.G. IN ADDITION TO ornate swords, Vikings created luxurious accessories — this wrist cuff includes silk, silver and gold threads — and high-quality leather boots, such as this 10th-century example. MODERN TECH FOR VIKING DISCOVERIES The Vikings reigned and roamed throughout the Middle Ages, a time known for its lack of surviving written records. Still, we can study other traces left behind from their settlements and conquests — with the help of the latest technology. 1 MASS SPECTROMETRY The Viking Age was characterized by international trade, including that of ivory, luxury furs and skins. Mass spectrometry, which can provide valuable analysis of molecular compounds in a given sample, makes possible the identification of the specific animals from which Danish Vikings made tunics and clothes. This shows us that the Norsemen often crafted their garments from the skin of domesticated species. 2 3D LASER SCANNING Another modern technique archaeologists use to study Vikings is 3D laser scanning. The process is non-destructive and versatile, providing scientists with 3D models of ancient artifacts. Archaeologists used the technique to create models of ornate Viking Age brooches from Scandinavia and Russia, which help them analyze how the brooches were made, what tools the Vikings used and the artwork that adorns them. 3 DNA ANALYSIS This provides some insights into the Vikings’ genetic influence within the countries they visited. Researchers sequenced the genomes of over 400 humans from archaeological sites across Europe and Greenland to understand the influence of the Viking voyages and settlements, and found that a Viking expedition included close family members. They also discovered an influx of Danish genes into England, Norwegian genes into Ireland and Swedish genes into the Baltic — all helping to confirm records of the Vikings’ journeys. — LYDIA RIVERS D ORIGINAL SCAN Researchers use 3D laser scanning to replicate and study artifacts like this Viking-Age grave marker. 32 DISCOVERMAGAZINE.COM
It’s been more than 100 years since the last Morgan Silver Dollar was struck for circulation. Morgans were the preferred currency of cowboys, ranchers and outlaws and earned a reputation as the coin that helped build the Wild West. Struck in 90% silver from 1878 to 1904, then again in 1921, these silver dollars came to be known by the name of their designer, George T. Morgan. They are one of the most revered, most-collected, vintage U.S. Silver Dollars ever. Celebrating the 100th Anniversary with Legal-Tender Morgans Honoring the 100th anniversary of the last year they were minted, the U.S. Mint struck fi ve different versions of the Morgan in 2021, paying tribute to each of the mints that struck the coin. The coins here honor the historic New Orleans Mint, a U.S. Mint branch from 1838–1861 and again from 1879–1909. These coins, featuring an “O” privy mark, a small differentiating mark, were struck in Philadelphia since the New Orleans Mint no longer exists. These beautiful coins are different than the originals because they’re struck in 99.9% fi ne silver instead of 90% silver/10% copper, and they were struck using modern technology, serving to enhance the details of the iconic design. Very Limited. Sold Out at the Mint! The U.S. Mint limited the production of these gorgeous coins to just 175,000, a ridiculously low number. Not surprisingly, they sold out almost instantly! That means you need to hurry to add these bright, shiny, new legal-tender Morgan Silver Dollars with the New Orleans privy mark, struck in 99.9% PURE Silver, to your collection. Call 1-888-395-3219 to secure yours now. PLUS, you’ll receive a BONUS American Collectors Pack, valued at $25, FREE with your order. Call now. These will not last! FREE SHIPPING! Limited time only. Standard domestic shipping only. Not valid on previous purchases. GovMint.com® is a retail distributor of coin and currency issues and is not affi liated with the U.S. government. The collectible coin market is unregulated, highly speculative and involves risk. GovMint.com reserves the right to decline to consummate any sale, within its discretion, including due to pricing errors. Prices, facts, fi gures and populations deemed accurate as of the date of publication but may change signifi cantly over time. All purchases are expressly conditioned upon your acceptance of GovMint.com’s Terms and Conditions (www.govmint.com/terms-conditions or call 1-800-721-0320); to decline, return your purchase pursuant to GovMint.com’s Return Policy. © 2022 GovMint.com. All rights reserved. SPECIAL CALL-IN ONLY OFFER The U.S. Mint Just Struck Morgan Silver Dollars for the First Time in 100 Years! O PRIVY MARK Actual size is 38.1 mm GovMint.com • 1300 Corporate Center Curve, Dept. NSD226-02, Eagan, MN 55121 1-888-395-3219 Offer Code NSD226-02 Please mention this code when you call. Struck in 99.9% k in 99.9% Fine Silver! For the First Time EVER! First Legal-Tender Morgans in a Century! VERY LIMITED! Sold Out at the Mint! O PRIVY MARK ® A+ Offer Code NSD226-02 To learn more, call now. First call, fi rst served!
EATS THESE NINE PLANTS AND ANIMALS CAUSE BILLIONS OF DOLLARS OF DAMAGE IN THE U.S. LUCKILY FOR THE ECO-MINDED, THEY’RE ALSO DELICIOUS. BY MARISA SLOAN G athered in a vineyard near Wren, Oregon, hungry guests eyed a buffet littered with culinary oddities: Wild nettle crescent buns featuring mustard blossom butter. Fennel blackberry gelato. French-style ale brewed with the wildflower Queen Anne’s lace. Welcome to the Institute for Applied Ecology’s annual invasive species cook-off. Andrew Esterson, the institute’s habitat restoration program director, served up his triedand-true chile verde, but sidelined the traditional pork for something less expected: swamp rat, a semi-aquatic rodent also known as nutria or coypu. “The meat was actually lovely, it was this dark purple-red color,” Esterson says of the novel protein. “If you add enough spices and peppers to anything, it’s probably going to taste pretty good. And it turned out to be delicious.” Delicious enough, in fact, to win first place in the savory meat category of the 2018 competition. But nutria (along with every other dish at the cook-off) shouldn’t be here, geographically speaking. Native to South America, the rodents were introduced to North America by fur farmers in the 20th century. By the time the international fur market collapsed in the 1980s, nutria had gained a reputation as insatiable pests — burrowing into irrigation structures, spreading disease and destroying the eggs and nests of waterbirds. They aren’t alone. Today, tens of thousands of non-native species thrive in U.S. lands and waters. Of those, nearly 6,500 are considered invasive — meaning they cause ecological or economic harm as they spread. These invaders, which often lack natural predators to keep them in check, wreak more environmental, health-related and financial damage each year than all other natural disasters combined. And it’s likely to get worse. As regions everywhere become warmer due to our changing climate, they become more hospitable to invasive species, while expanding global trade perpetuates their spread. This daunting eco-challenge has sparked a culinary solution: Transform non-native plants and animals into something delicious and add them to our menus. The movement could put a dent in invasive populations while inventing some fun new meals too. Plenty of restaurants, food suppliers and adventurous eaters have heeded the call — and shared some suggestions to get you started. THIS PAGE: DMITR1CH/SHUTTERSTOCK. OPPOSITE PAGE: HLAVKOM/DREAMSTIME 34 DISCOVERMAGAZINE.COM INVASIVE
THE BROWN garden snail is considered one of the most destructive pests in gardens and landscapes, with a preference for citrus trees and fruit.
36 DISCOVERMAGAZINE.COM CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT: SWEET MARSHMALLOW/SHUTTERSTOCK; MSNIDER/SHUTTERSTOCK; JIANG HONGYAN/SHUTTERSTOCK Kudzu hails from Asia but was introduced to the U.S. as an ornamental plant at the 1876 Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia. For most of the next century, farmers cultivated the leafy vine en masse to feed livestock and reduce soil erosion. Government agencies even funded the effort and provided over 85 million seedlings, while danger lurked in their aggressive growth rate. Kudzu quashes native plant species, even entire trees, by smothering them from sunlight. Growing at a staggering rate of 1 foot per day, it didn’t take long for the killer vine to outgrow the farmland where it was first cultivated. Although it’s known as “the vine that ate the South,” the species has so far been reported in forests across 31 states, as far north as New York and as far west as Hawaii, according to a mapping system developed by the University of Georgia. KUDZU 2 For thousands of years, people hailing from Eastern and Southeastern Asia have consumed its roots, which make up 40 percent of the total plant, as a staple food and herbal medicine today called “longevity powder” or “Asian ginseng.” So long as they haven’t come into contact with herbicides, toss the leaves into a soup or salad; pickle the grape-scented purple flowers or transform them into jellies and syrups; or use the starchy roots as a glutenfree alternative to wheat flour in your favorite soup. → TRY IT YOURSELF $26 BILLION ESTIMATED ANNUAL DAMAGE FROM INVASIVES OVER THE PAST DECADE IN THE U.S. The brown garden snail is native to the Mediterranean region and Western Europe. Now, however, the mollusk is one of the most widely spread land snails in the world and considered invasive in parts of the U.S. and Canada. In many cases, the living escargot was deliberately imported from Europe for food and farming (and for the occasional hobbyist’s snail collection). French immigrants, for example, introduced the snail to California as food during the 1850s. Just a half-century later, many Californians deemed the brown garden snail a pest in citrus orchards. It’s also a major threat to vineyards, garden flowers, grain and other agricultural industry sectors. To combat them, farmers turn to pruning, poison and even the predatory decollate snail — which carries the risk of introducing further harm to an ecosystem. 1 GARDEN SNAIL In the southeast U.S. or along the West and East coasts, grab a cloth bag for an evening or morning stroll through your yard. Snails found in the fall are thought to be the tastiest, but they’re also abundant in the spring. Just rinse them and boil for a few minutes to access the meat. → TRY IT YOURSELF
If you aren’t much of a hunter, plenty of brick-and-mortar and online shops offer wild boar meat, said to be more delicious than domestic pork due to its leaner body. Try it in ragout or headlining a barbecue slider. → TRY IT YOURSELF Wild boars are native to Eurasia, but can now be found on every continent except Antarctica. The U.S. Department of Agriculture says the boar was introduced to the States in the early 1900s for private hunting. Similarly, domestic pigs were introduced by settlers as a food source in the 1500s. Today, feral swine are typically hybrids of these Eurasian wild boars and pigs that have escaped captivity. The population, which is most concentrated across California and the southern U.S., is now estimated to exceed 6 million. Just keep in mind that this is not your typical pig. The tusked and pernicious porkers are responsible for over $1.5 billion in annual damage to U.S. grassland and forest ecosystems and crops, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. They can also host a huge variety of viruses, bacteria and parasites. 3 TOP: PHOTOCECHCZ/SHUTTERSTOCK. INSET: STOCKCREATIONS/SHUTTERSTOCK WILD BOAR
FROM LEFT: S-F/SHUTTERSTOCK; MOTH/DREAMSTIME 38 DISCOVERMAGAZINE.COM Scattered from Brazil to New York, without any natural predators or parasites, lionfish populations reach concentrations five to 15 times greater than in their native waters of the South Pacific and Indian oceans. En masse, they can obliterate communities of native fish. Rumors persist that the invasion began with a shattered aquarium during Hurricane Andrew in 1992, but evidence suggests they were introduced no later than 1985 at a site along Dania Beach, Florida. Today, hunting lionfish has become a recreation of sorts. The international Reef Environmental Education Foundation has hosted annual “Lionfish Derbies” since 2010, awarding prizes to those who spear the largest and smallest fish and the greatest quantity while diving and snorkeling. (Top catches have measured in just over 18 inches.) And ever since the Seafood Watch sustainability program gave a green light for consumption in 2016, grocery stores like Whole Foods have offered tasty lionfish filets to their customers. LIONFISH 4 Conservation biologist Joe Roman describes lionfish as a gateway species for anyone curious about eating invasives. Its firm, white meat is reminiscent of grouper, with a mild, buttery flavor. And you prepare it just like other fish — after a fishmonger removes its venomous spines. (The venom can stay active after the fish dies, so handle with caution!) Grill it, stew it, bake it in breadcrumbs or roll it into a roulade. → TRY IT YOURSELF The American bullfrog is found natively in the lakes, ponds and wetlands of eastern North America. To the west of the Rockies — as well as parts of Central and South America, Western Europe and Asia — the species is considered invasive. There, the bullfrog ambushes and eats anything that will fit in its mouth: insects, crustaceans, fishes, birds, reptiles, even other amphibians. Frog legs were commonly eaten in Southern China as early as the first century A.D. On the other side of the world, the Aztecs partook as well. In Europe, the first mention of the food comes from the Catholic Church in 12th-century France, when hungry monks abstaining from meat categorized the amphibian as a fish. Nowadays, its invasion into more than 50 countries can be attributed to the international frog trade and the practice of frog farming — the U.S. and European Union are some of the largest importers. It’s a big issue, mainly because the frog is also a vector for the chytrid fungus, implicated in the extinction of nearly 100 other frog species. 5 If you’re seeking a leg to nibble on, experts recommend against buying farmed or native frog. Seek out a stream or swamp where bullfrogs are invasive. Back in your kitchen, add the meat to a wok with teriyaki sauce and veggies, or dredge it in beer batter and deep-fry it Cajun style. → TRY IT YOURSELF AMERICAN BULLFROG
TOP: KURIT AFSHEN/SHUTTERSTOCK. INSET: KEADPRAWAT SONJOY/SHUTTERSTOCK Eating iguana is nothing new. Communities in South and Central America have eaten the native “chicken of the trees” since pre-colonial times. In Florida, no hunting license or permit is needed for capturing and killing the lizard. If you’re hankering for a taste, skin the iguana or dip it in hot water to scrape off its scales. Then boil in salt water for half an hour before roasting or stewing to your heart’s desire. → TRY IT YOURSELF GREEN IGUANA The green iguana is native to Central and South America and parts of the Caribbean, but the pet trade is to blame for its invasion of Florida, Texas, Hawaii, Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands toward the turn of the 21st century. Young green iguanas are commonly purchased as pets due to their small size, affordable price tag and low cost of maintenance. But the cute critters don’t stay small forever. They can grow up to 6 feet in length and quickly outgrow the homes that once wanted them. Turned loose and now running rampant (and reproducing) by the thousands in South Florida, the green iguana devours landscaping and digs burrows that degrade sidewalks, canals and seawalls. Although primarily herbivores, they also threaten endangered species such as tree snails and the Miami Blue butterfly. In Puerto Rico, populations have been known to take over sunny airport runways and cause flight delays — or, in worse circumstances, damage aircrafts. 6 YYYYS
40 DISCOVERMAGAZINE.COM The next time a dandelion crops up in your lawn, try transferring it to your kitchen instead. Toss its arugula-like leaves into a salad raw, or boil or sauté them. Use its bright yellow blossoms to make a dandelion tea or wine, or try infusing them in oil. Even the roots are edible and can be transformed into a tasty drink similar to coffee. → TRY IT YOURSELF → BALANCING ACT OF SUPPLY AND DEMAND If you’re already itching to purchase some lionfish filets, remember that the goal is not to get hooked permanently on a new cuisine, says Martin Nuñez, an ecologist at the University of Houston. He warns that a rise in demand could generate market pressure to maintain a species or even spread it to other regions. Even if consumers keep this in mind, some species — looking at you, dandelions — will likely never be eaten to total extinction. Yet functional eradication, or limiting invasives to levels that cause the least ecological harm, is feasible with a little public outreach, says conservation biologist Joe Roman, founder of the educational website Eat the Invaders. He suggests newcomers to the invasivore movement forage for native and nonnative species in their own backyards before exploring supermarket aisles. — M.S. TOP: DUSANZIDAR/DREAMSTIME. INSET: LEDYX/SHUTTERSTOCK DANDELION Step aside, flower crowns. There’s another use for dandelions, the perennial herb native to Europe and Asia and considered aggressively invasive in gardens, lawns and meadows worldwide. In North America, the dandelion was introduced during European settlement — both intentionally and accidentally. German physician and botanist Leonhard Fuchs described it in the 16th century as a miracle medication for everything from gout and diarrhea to spleen and liver issues. More recent research identifies other health benefits of eating the plant, including antioxidant activity, anti-inflammatory activity and blood sugar regulation. Despite its nutritious value and low ecological impact on native ecosystems, dandelions are now considered a nuisance by many. The weed’s fluffy seeds are capable of spreading up to 60 miles via the wind; and once it has rooted, good luck removing the 10 to 15 feet of dandelion roots without spreading more seeds. 7 NOT ALL NON-NATIVE SPECIES ARE INVASIVE. IN FACT, CORN AND WHEAT, TWO OF THE HIGHEST YIELD CROPS IN THE U.S., CAME FROM OVERSEAS, JUST LIKE MANY OF THESE INVASIVES.
FROM LEFT: DAVIDE BONORA/SHUTTERSTOCK; MARIE MARTIN/GETTY IMAGES/ISTOCKPHOTO ASIAN SHORE CRAB Asian shore crabs originated in the temperate and subtropical regions of the western Pacific. The crustacean was first seen thousands of miles from home near Delaware Bay in 1988, but it likely arrived years before then via ballast water of a cargo ship. Over the next 15 years, the population exploded until it became the dominant crab along the intertidal coastline of the U.S., from North Carolina to Maine. The Asian shore crab is responsible for displacing a variety of other crab species, according to a 2003 study published in Northeastern Naturalist, including mud crabs and the previously invasive green crab. Biologists attribute its success to an impressive spawning season (it breeds for twice as long as many native crabs) and its ability to outcompete other species for space and food. Although only about the size of a quarter, there isn’t much that the opportunistic glutton won’t consume if it’s physically capable of doing so, including mollusks and other crustaceans. D The Asian giant hornet, also known as the “murder hornet,” has made headlines as the world’s largest hornet. It originates from parts of southeast Asia and eastern Russia, but was recently detected in North America for the first time; a 2020 study conducted by Tianjin Normal University and Washington State University researchers identified swaths of the Pacific Northwest as prime real estate for the hornets in the next two decades if left unchecked. No one knows how they were introduced, but it’s all hands on deck to prevent the insects from spreading further. The U.S. Department of Agriculture allocated nearly $1 million to research and eradication efforts in its 2021 budget, and for good reason. A group of 30 Asian giant hornets can wipe out a colony of 30,000 honeybees in less than four hours. And one 2020 study in Pest Management Science predicted the invasive species could threaten as many as 100,000 honeybee colonies and cost the U.S. an estimated $114 million in hive-derived products and bee-pollinated crops. 8 ASIAN GIANT HORNET In some regions of Japan, the murder hornet is considered a delicacy. Along with other wasp species, its larvae are often jarred, pan-fried or steamed with rice. The adult hornets, coming in at around 2 inches long, are fried on skewers. But for some real pep, try a liquor featuring their venom — made by live hornets releasing the poison as they drown in a distilled drink called shochu. (TBD if Americans will ever take to dunking the insects in their whisky.) → TRY IT YOURSELF 9 To curb their population, take a page out of their book. The Asian shore crab can be found in clusters under rocks and in tide pools at low tide. American author and journalist Rowan Jacobsen has described it, when fried whole, as a crispy Dorito with legs. That ’s right — even the shell and appendages are edible. → TRY IT YOURSELF
n 2022, NASA celebrated 25 consecutive years of Mars exploration — the longest humankind has continuously monitored another planet. But there’s a key phrase in that statement that’s easy to overlook: another planet. Even as planetary scientists strive to understand the fellow planets circling our sun, it’s worth remembering that we have the perfect scientific testbed right at our fingertips. As the most familiar planet — and perhaps the strangest — Earth gives us insight into the forces that shaped our solar system, revealing clues about how rocky planets form and evolve. Studying Earth lets us walk before we run, testing techniques and technologies in a familiar setting before sending them to other worlds. But the more we learn, the more we see that our planet is one of the weirdest places we’ve ever encountered, uniquely shaped and forever altered by the life-forms it sustains. EVERY PLANET IN our solar system formed from the same ingredients: gas and dust in the solar nebula around our nascent sun. The inner planets assembled closer to our star, where temperatures were warmer, meaning volatiles — elements that turn into a gas at low temperatures — were rare. As a result, these planets are largely rocky, with atmospheres and surface water that came much later, released through geologic processes or delivered by impacts. Although their sizes, compositions, and distances from the sun differ, the basic processes that formed and shaped Mercury, Venus, Earth, and Mars can be read in the rocks right under our feet. “The same physics apply on all the planets,” says Rebecca Ghent, a senior scientist at the Planetary Science Institute whose current work focuses on the geology of Earth, the moon, and Mars. It’s the ways in which those physics play out, she says, as well as which ingredients are available on each planet, that create the differences that provide vital clues about planetary evolution. All the terrestrial planets, she says, are subject to gravity-driven effects such as cratering, sedimentation, and landslides; interior-driven processes such as volcanism; and processes driven by water on or below the surface. Taken together, “comparative studies of the planets can tell us lots more about the underlying processes than we can learn from studying a single planet in isolation,” Ghent says. Essentially, instead of starting from scratch to understand a given world, scientists can apply their knowledge of how processes work on one planet (say, Earth) to extrapolate how they work somewhere else. This is called comparative planetology, and it’s a valuable first step when looking out across the solar system. “Terrestrial analogues and how we can study specific locations on Earth and apply that knowledge to places that seem completely unterrestrial, like [Saturn’s moon] Titan or certain places like Mars or Venus, are all really important,” says AS RESEARCHERS STRIVE TO UNDERSTAND OUR SOLAR SYSTEM, THERE’S A PERFECT LABORATORY RIGHT UNDER OUR FEET. 42 DISCOVERMAGAZINE.COM NASA EARTH PLANET TOO! IS A BY ALISON KLESMAN
IN HAWAII, researchers simulate a manned Mars mission, collecting geologic samples in landscapes similar to regions of Mars. Training on Earth allows future astronauts to learn how to best achieve their goals before setting foot on another world.
44 DISCOVERMAGAZINE.COM CLOCKWISE FROM TOP: NASA; CARLA THOMAS/NASA; JIM ROOS/NASA Matthew Chojnacki, a research scientist also at the Planetary Science Institute and a participant in the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment, or HiRISE, orbiting Mars. SOMETIMES, PROCESSES are no longer active but have left signs of their presence, Ghent says. Based on how the presence of water has changed Earth’s landscape over time, scientists have identified widespread evidence of flowing surface water on Mars in the planet’s past. One such place is the river delta preserved inside Jezero Crater, where NASA’s Perseverance rover touched down in February of 2021. John Mustard of Brown University chaired the Mars 2020 mission’s Science Definition Team and is one of many planetary scientists studying the site. Among other features of interest, Jezero contains the mineral magnesite, whose formation suggests the region has been altered by water. Furthermore, “Some magnesite deposits on the Earth are tightly coupled to a biological setting,” Mustard says, making Jezero an intriguing location to search for signs of ancient life — one of the rover’s four main science objectives. Meanwhile, Perseverance’s predecessor, Curiosity, has shown researchers that Gale Crater, an ancient lakebed, once experienced conditions akin to modern-day Iceland. To make the find, published in 2021 in JGR Planets, researchers compared soil formed in various locations on Earth to the readings sent back from the rover. “Earth provided an excellent laboratory for us in this study,” said co-author Kirsten Siebach of Rice University in a press release announcing the discovery. “The range of climates on Earth allowed us to calibrate our thermometer for measuring the temperature on ancient Mars.” GEOLOGY ISN’T the only feature researchers can compare between planets. On Earth, weather prediction and climate modeling have become integral to our daily lives. Over the past several decades, meteorologists have developed sophisticated models based on advanced observations of how our atmosphere works. While Earth’s atmosphere certainly contains a different mix of ingredients than its neighbors, both near and far, the underlying physics that govern how an atmosphere acts remain the same. “Climate models that have been created for the Earth are now increasingly being EN ROUTE TO THE MOON, the Apollo 17 crew captured one of the most iconic images of our planet Dec. 7, 1972. NASA’S AIRBORNE observatories include a DC-8 (left), whose instruments can be swapped out for different missions; and the ER-2 (right) — a modified U2 spy plane able to reach altitudes up to 70,000 feet.
SEP/OCT 2022 . DISCOVER 45 ROEN KELLY/DISCOVER adapted to look at other planets: Mars, even the gas giants and exoplanets,” says Richard Eckman, program manager for NASA’s Atmospheric Modeling and Analysis Program. Eckman also serves as the earth science representative to the crossdivisional exoplanets science program at NASA. This group, he says, seeks to better understand exoplanets by exploiting the similarities between observing our planet and, as technology progresses, observing planets around other stars. “We are able to test the models on Earth, and we have some confidence in [the] physics and parameterizations and so forth,” he says. “Obviously, for the gas giants and these other very different kinds of atmospheres, I think that there’s a lot of adaptation that’s done. But for terrestrial-like planets, certainly Mars and terrestrial exoplanets, the modifications are more straightforward.” DESPITE THE many benefits of using Earth as a laboratory, the comparison eventually breaks down. “Venus, Earth, and Mars are on a continuum, where you have major changes in temperature, you have major changes in atmospheric pressure and atmospheric composition, and those bring some serious challenges to not just operating in those environments, but also in comparing the different geologic processes that are occurring there, because they’re not exact,” Chojnacki says. For example, Mars today experiences a carbon dioxide cycle, while Earth supports a water cycle. But because water and carbon dioxide behave differently — especially under martian and terrestrial conditions — the two cycles are similar but not directly comparable. Similarly, while martian winds sculpt the landscape just as terrestrial winds do, Mars’ atmosphere is much thinner and its winds subsequently much weaker. “You don’t see sand dunes migrating [on Mars] like they do in Egypt, for example,” Chojnacki says. On Mars, “you have to wait a decade to see the kinds of changes that you might see in the African sand seas in just a month. There is a more muted effect because of the differences in atmosphere.” “As we study comparative planetology, you think, ‘Let’s study these terrestrial planets, the rocky ones. They all should follow the same [evolutionary] path.’ And they don’t,” Mustard says. “There’s this stochasticity, this randomness that comes into play. And I think that’s a fascinating part of it. Earth is fantastic, we really know how it operates, but we can’t be naïve enough to think that every planet operates that way.” NASA’S EARTH SCIENCE Division seeks to understand our planet as a unique environment in its own right. “Studying the Earth from space has always been an important part of NASA’s mandate,” says Hank Margolis, program manager for NASA’s Terrestrial Ecology Program. “NASA and other space agencies have a large fleet of satellites that make observations of the Earth’s surface and its atmosphere.” Earth science research currently receives about $2 billion from NASA’s budget each year — slightly more than the amount awarded to the agency’s astrophysics division, which studies the larger universe as a whole. As of early 2022, NASA operates around 30 space-based Earth-observing missions, including joint missions with other agencies. By comparison, NASA has about half that many interplanetary missions scattered throughout the solar system. Earth scientists also have more than satellites at their disposal. Airborne missions provide measurements close to the ground that are difficult or impossible to make from low Earth orbit, Eckman MERCURY VENUS EARTH MARS 8% Other 42% Oxygen 22% Sodium 22% Hydrogen 6% Helium < 0.1% Other 96% barbon dioxide 4% Nitrogen 0.7% Other 95% barbon dioxide 2.7% Nitrogen 1.6% Argon 0.9% Argon 78% Nitrogen 21% Oxygen 0.1% Other (carbon dioxide, water, etc.) 0.984 D E N S I T Y M A S S D I A M E T E R A T M O S P H E R E 0.383 0.0553 0.815 1 1 1 0.107 0.951 0.949 0.713 0.532 = 7,918 miles (12,742 km) = 1.317 x 1025 pounds (5.972 x 1024 kg) = 344 lb/ft3 (5,513 kg/m3) The solar system’s terrestrial planets formed close to our star out of roughly the same ingredients. Many differences today arise because of slightly different initial conditions, although general comparisons can still be made. Here’s how the four terrestrial planets stack up; note that the mass, diameter, and density of Mercury, Venus, and Mars are all shown as ratios of Earth’s values.
46 DISCOVERMAGAZINE.COM NASA HEADQUARTERS & ROEN KELLY/DISCOVER explains. These missions target a variety of areas, ranging from air quality and cloud formation to the amount of ice, coral, or vegetation on land or sea. Many airborne missions provide a cost-effective way to test technologies ultimately bound for space, whether aboard Earth-orbiting satellites or a spacecraft destined for another world. Cameras and other passive sensors record the amount of energy, such as reflected sunlight, coming from the planet. For Earth, Margolis says, that information can be related to “the biophysical properties of the land surface, such as the amount of leaves, the absorption of radiation by vegetation canopies, the types and the changes of land cover, the area of snow cover.” Active sensors send out signals, such as radio waves (radar) or laser light (lidar), which bounce off land and water, reflecting back to the spacecraft. Scientists can then determine how the signal has changed and relate those changes to properties of the planet below. A recent addition to the Earthobserving fleet, Sentinel-6 Michael Freilich, uses radar to measure sea level of more than 90 percent of Earth’s oceans to within just a fraction of an inch. Lidar allows researchers to visualize the vertical structure of vegetation, while radar can characterize vegetation even through cloud cover, Margolis says. Studying all these aspects of Earth allows researchers to understand how our planet is evolving and predict how land, water, and vegetation might change in the future. NATURALLY, MOST Earth-observing satellites orbit Earth, with many in geostationary orbits that keep them above one region of the planet even as it rotates. One mission is different: Launched in 2015, the Deep Space Climate Observatory (DSCOVR) was originally proposed in the late ’90s by then-Vice President Al Gore. But the spacecraft was put on hold for decades until the Obama administration resurrected it as a joint heliophysics and earth science mission, says Eckman. Now operated by NASA, the U.S. Air Force, and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, DSCOVR is located roughly 1 million miles from Earth, positioned between our planet and the sun at a stable Lagrange point where the gravitational influences of our planet and our star cancel each other out. From this vantage point, called L1, the mission studies the solar wind in real time, offering warnings as much as 60 minutes before solar storms hit our International Space Station DSCOVR ICESat-2 GRACE-FO CYGNSS SMAP Sentinel-6 Michael Freilich OCO-2 Landsat 8 Aqua SORCE Aura CALIPSO CloudSat Suomi NPP Terra GPM Core Observatory Landsat 7 LIS SAGE III TSIS-1 GEDI OCO-3 ECOSTRESS NASA’S EARTH-OBSERVING FLEET NASA CURRENTLY OPERATES some 30 space-based Earth-observing missions — many shown here — to address a variety of science objectives, including monitoring climate, sea level, land use and vegetation health.
SEP/OCT 2022 . DISCOVER 47 FROM LEFT: NASA IMAGE CREATED BY JESSE ALLEN, USING DATA PROVIDED BY THE UNIVERSITY OF MARYLAND’S GLOBAL LAND COVER FACILITY; ESA/DLR/FU-BERLIN planet. But DSCOVR also looks back at Earth, snapping photos every two hours at 10 different wavelengths that include ultraviolet and infrared light. (Those images are available to the public daily at https://epic.gsfc.nasa.gov.) “But it’s way more than pretty pictures,” Eckman says of DSCOVR’s earth science contributions. “Amazingly, from a million kilometers out, we can measure ozone and aerosols and clouds and sulfuric acid droplets from volcanic eruptions and all kinds of cool stuff, useful stuff — and looking uniquely at the entire Earth in a way that even geosynchronous weather satellites can’t.” EVEN AT ITS VAST distance, DSCOVR’s camera can resolve areas as small as about 16 miles across. And because it regularly takes global pictures, Eckman says, DSCOVR can look at certain aspects of vegetation — like the size of plant canopies or the amount of biomass present — more easily than satellites closer to the planet. Plus, DSCOVR’s pictures show diurnal, or daily, variations across the planet that can’t be observed from low Earth orbit. “DSCOVR has made the case of being a highly productive science instrument apart from the daily RGB [true-color] visible images that are probably what most people think about,” Eckman says. Such long-term observing campaigns of Earth have taught scientists one sure thing: Our planet is unique and bizarre, with unusual properties that don’t match those of any other world we’ve seen, either in our own solar system or beyond it. Earth is the only planet with abundant liquid water driving an active water cycle. From weather to weathering, the effects of water are everywhere. Our home world is also the only known planet with active plate tectonics, in which distinct pieces of crust are constantly created and destroyed in a planetwide recycling program that drives phenomena like earthquakes and volcanoes. Tectonic activity is even responsible for releasing volatiles from Earth’s interior, which helped create — and now maintain — our atmosphere. Then there’s the moon. “Without the catastrophic moon-forming impact very early in the solar system’s history, the Earth would not be the way it is today, at all,” Mustard says. That impact and the satellite it formed have affected everything from the strength of Earth’s tides to the stability of our planet’s 23.4° tilt. Without the moon, our tides would be solely influenced by the sun — and, given its vast distance, would consequently be much weaker. This would have brought about very different landscapes at the interface where water meets land. And with no moon, our planet’s rotation axis would wobble unpredictably, destabilizing the climate on timescales of just a few thousand years. PERHAPS IN PART because of all these factors, Earth is, thus far, the only planet we know of that hosts life. And that life has left its mark on our world. “Over geologic time periods, the Earth’s vegetation has played a major role in the evolution of the atmosphere,” Margolis says. In fact, “vegetation is largely responsible for the current level of oxygen in the atmosphere: 20 percent.” Earth started out with an atmosphere rich in methane and carbon dioxide. But photosynthesis, the process by which plants convert sunlight and carbon dioxide into energy, releases oxygen as a byproduct. “There was life in existence as photosynthesis was getting going,” DECADES OF OBSERVATIONS have revealed that the surface of Mars was much wetter in the past. The Perseverance Mars rover’s landing site in Jezero Crater (right) shows the telltale features of an ancient river delta. For comparison, at left is the Mississippi Delta, photographed by NASA’s Landsat 7 in 2001. LONG-TERM OBSERVING CAMPAIGNS OF EARTH HAVE TAUGHT SCIENTISTS ONE SURE THING: OUR PLANET IS UNIQUE AND BIZARRE.
48 DISCOVERMAGAZINE.COM CLOCKWISE FROM TOP: LAUREN DAUPHIN, USING LANDSAT DATA FROM THE U.S. GEOLOGICAL SURVEY; ROEN KELLY/DISCOVER (2) Mustard says. “But then, 2.5 billion years ago, Earth pivoted to an oxygen [atmosphere] and it just killed off [nearly] all the early forms of life. It was just a catastrophic moment for life at that time.” But that catastrophic moment paved the way for life — and Earth — as we know it today. YET ANOTHER CURIOUS characteristic of our planet: Earth has a huge number of minerals. Referencing work led by Robert Hazen of the Carnegie Institution for Science, Mustard explains that meteorites — leftover planetary building blocks — have a small number of minerals. “Then on the moon, you’ve got an increasing number.” Finally, he says, “You go to the Earth and it’s just ridiculous.” Why is this? The prevalence of water isn’t enough to explain the disparity, Mustard says. But “if you look at Earth’s history, the number of minerals that we know exist increases with time,” he explains. “You had these big explosions of mineral diversity something like 600 million years ago — which coincides with the emergence of life on land. [Life] just changes the chemical reactions, the environment, so much. … The coevolution of life and geology on Earth — we can’t disentangle that, I don’t think.” But perhaps the clearest example of life shaping Earth’s land, sea, and air is much more recent — and, in fact, currently playing out. “I’d say humans are among the dominant forces of change on the planet,” Mustard says. Much of his career has been dedicated to observing how Earth’s surface changes in response to both natural and human forces. And there are plenty of human forces at work. We remove or replace vegetation. We exhaust or reroute water supplies. We populate and reshape coastlines. And we produce or release massive amounts of atmosphere-altering gases. Fortunately, earth science is different from other planetary science in one final, fundamentally important way: Earth science is actionable science. By monitoring the changes our host planet undergoes, we can make choices and Venus and Earth are stunningly similar; in fact, Venus is often called Earth’s sister planet. At first glance, it’s easy to see why: Earth is a mere 1.1 times wider and 1.2 times more massive than Venus, and they’re made up of largely the same material in equal amounts. Yet, the two look vastly different. It’s an experiment in how small initial differences can snowball into huge effects further down the line, leading one planet to become the lush, water-filled paradise we enjoy today, while the other becomes a broiling, toxic wasteland. But research suggests both may have started out with roughly the same amount of water. So, what happened? That’s the million-dollar question. We do know that Venus rotates retrograde, or backward, compared to its orbital motion around the sun — the only planet to do so. Although its core is still hot, like Earth’s, Venus has no plate tectonics. Its oppressively thick atmosphere is about 96 percent carbon dioxide, 4 percent nitrogen, and less than 0.1 percent other gases. Earth has a comparatively light atmosphere consisting of 78 percent nitrogen, EARTH AND VENUS: SEPARATED AT BIRTH NATURAL SETTLING, human-built levees and canals, and sea-level rise are all imprinted upon Louisiana’s Barataria Bay, seen in 1985 (left), and in 2020. As a result of both natural and human change, the region has lost as much as 430 square miles of land in less than 100 years.
SEP/OCT 2022 . DISCOVER 49 take actions that reduce or alter our effect on the landscape. “What we learn from spaceborne measurements can have very practical applications to human society — e.g., wildfire management, forest management, disaster management, improving agriculture, managing air pollution, managing biodiversity, etc.,” Margolis says. And Chojnacki notes that the same remote-sensing techniques researchers use to determine how humans are affecting the planet can also show us how well mitigation efforts are progressing. DESPITE ITS STRANGENESS, Earth is the planet we are most familiar with and are best suited to survive on. Thus, it serves as a necessary jumping-off point when we turn our gaze outward. NASA once trained the Apollo astronauts to become lunar field geologists by taking them to Hawaii or Arizona. Researchers today are setting up simulated Mars camps in Utah and Hawaii or traveling to Antarctica to test how easy — or hard — it will be to carry out geologic research with rovers and in space suits. “It’s useful to be on Earth and actually have a timeline and try to understand how you’re going to collect that many geologic samples in eight hours with your supplies when you’re in the field — and how complicated that gets in reality,” says Chojnacki. “Field studies and terrestrial applications are certainly going to pave the way for lunar and martian exploration.” And as Eckman points out, several exoplanets have been identified in recent years with at least some Earthlike characteristics. Based on our understanding of the solar system, terrestrial planets all likely share at least a somewhat similar origin story. But, Mustard says, “Planets are built by chance. And we should be grateful and thankful that the chances that came together that formed the Earth resulted in this. It just says it’s a special place and let’s not mess it up.” D Alison Klesman is a senior associate editor at Astronomy. 21 percent oxygen, and 1 percent other gases. Despite these differences, Earth’s strange sister still has much to offer. Venus doesn’t look much like modern-day Earth, but scientists think the two were much more similar shortly after formation, potentially making Venus a good analogue for a younger Earth. “Venus is the only planet that can teach us both about early Earth and the birth of both plate tectonics and continents — two processes that have profoundly shaped life on Earth,” says Suzanne Smrekar, principal investigator of the Venus Emissivity, Radio Science, InSAR, Topography & Spectroscopy (VERITAS) mission, which was recently selected as one of two Venus missions to receive NASA funding. Smrekar also worked on the Magellan spacecraft that orbited Venus in the early 1990s. “On Earth, plate tectonics is the fundamental process that links the interior heat engine to surface geology and releases (and recycles) volatiles from the interior to create the atmosphere,” Smrekar says. “Yet this process began billions of years ago, leaving only vague clues about how it started. There are many models but little data. By going to Venus … we have a chance to see processes that shaped the birth of our home planet in action.” — A.K.
A pod’S