SEP/OCT 2022 . DISCOVER 51 Legs trailing in the water, I gripped the side of the boat, alert for my cue. As we rose to the top of a swell, the skipper spotted something in the distance and killed the engine. “Go, go, go!” I dropped with my buddy into the Atlantic Ocean, its floor thousands of feet below us. A moment later, the boat was gone. We were alone. The water was as clear as the air above us; I felt a sense of vertigo as I floated above the abyss. All I could do was wait and hope. Then a huge shape appeared on the edge of my vision against the blue, and another, and another. Gradually the shapes became more distinct as they headed straight at me. I hung in the water, electrified by the sight — the largest predators on the planet, the fearsome protagonist of perhaps the most famous seafaring novel of literary history, Moby Dick. I was face to face with sperm whales. I was in the Azores to study the social behavior of whales, and had gone there with some trepidation. Although this group of mid-Atlantic islands has a resident population of sperm whales, making it one of the best places in the world for biologists to study them, the Azorean relationship with whales has not always been a harmonious one. Whaling was for many years an important part of the culture here, continuing until 1984. Although 27 years had passed since the end of whaling in the Azores, it was likely that adult sperm whales in the region would have experience of humans as hunters. Reason enough, I supposed, for these intelligent beasts to be cautious, or even aggressive, when encountering us in the water. A RARE INTERSPECIES ADOPTION REVEALS SPERM WHALE SOCIETY IS MORE SOPHISTICATED — AND MORE PLAYFUL — THAN PREVIOUSLY THOUGHT. BY ASHLEY WARD ILLUSTRATIONS BY KELLIE JAEGER Bonds
52 DISCOVERMAGAZINE.COM Over the past half-century, there has been a sea change in the way we appreciate whales — as well as their fellow cetaceans, dolphins and porpoises. Although our historical relationship as predators and prey is regrettably continuing in some parts of the globe, most people now have some understanding of how complex and fascinating these creatures are, and know they are imbued with an intelligence that overreaches that of almost every other species on the planet. In their societies, we see compelling and enduring relationships, sophisticated interactions, and strong evidence of an animal culture. WHEN OUR TEAM of four headed out from the Port of Madalena for the first time, however, we had only the most tantalizing glimpses of the whales as they disappeared into the blue. The small boat we were using was maneuverable, but it didn’t cope well with the large swells, and finding whales is challenging in rough seas. Each day of that initial period was a carbon copy of the last, washing up and down the Atlantic rollers, eyes peeled on the horizon, the only soundtrack my companion Romain’s periodic, heartfelt retching. Our prospecting was aided by the gimlet eyes of an ancient mariner, Joao, employed as a lookout and ensconced in a hut halfway up the volcano that originally gave birth to Pico Island. Strange to think that Joao had learned his trade and sharpened his skills by being the spotter for whalers years before. Times had changed, even if his job hadn’t. But for four days, even the experienced Joao struggled to spot any whales in the surging sea. The telltale sign of the whales is their spout, the steamy exhalation of air and bits of other, less agreeable things that are fired out of its blowhole at the end of a dive. A decent-sized whale might launch its gust of moist air above the surface, but amid rough seas, you still need good luck to detect it. Far below the waves, the whales were feeding. They’re prodigious divers, capable of descending more than a mile into the darkness of the midnight zone for more than an hour at a time. Generally, however, they don’t need to push themselves so hard — it all depends on where they can find their food. To tip the balance in their favor, especially when hunting larger and more elusive prey, sperm whales coordinate and cooperate. They descend to their feeding grounds in pairs or small groups to form a search cordon, a line of whales spaced over half a mile of ocean, a smart solution for locating clusters of prey. Finding a dense patch of squid is only part of the battle, however. Traces taken from underwater GPS devices mounted on the whales show that they divide to conquer — one whale dives below the squid to cut off their escape to deeper water, allowing the other whales to attack the flanks of the prey group. Nonetheless, our understanding of their hunting, like so many aspects of sperm whale behavior, is in its infancy. Finally, on the fifth day of our trip, the waves relented. At last, we had a chance. Sure enough, it wasn’t long before
SEP/OCT 2022 . DISCOVER 53 we heard the radio crackle into life and an excited voice reeling off directions in Portuguese. The skipper shifted course and told us that a pod of sperm whales lay just over a mile to the northwest. If the whales decided to change course, or to dive, then that was just bad luck. If there were to be encounters, these would be entirely on the whales’ terms. So we expected, at best, a few precious seconds with the whales as they passed — enough, if we were really lucky, to notice a few things, such as identifying marks or scars. But it wasn’t only the ocean swell that had calmed; the whales, too, seemed in less of a hurry. Rather than cruising past, they lingered, and suddenly we found ourselves at the center of a family frolic. It was a phenomenal experience, greater by far than I’d dared to dream of. I couldn’t simply hang at the water’s surface and enjoy it passively, though; the cavorting whales kept coming perilously close, forcing me to scoot out of their way each time a mighty tail threatened to knock me spinning. The pod was made up of four whales: a huge matriarch more than 30 feet long, a slightly smaller individual about three-quarters her size, and two calves. Wonderful as all this was on its own, there was a cherry on our cetacean cake — with the pod was an adult bottlenose dolphin. The two species are tolerant of one another, but their different lifestyles and prey preferences mean that they seldom associate. What might have decided the issue was that the dolphin had a pronounced curvature of the spine, twisting its body just behind the dorsal fin. It didn’t look like an injury (there was no scarring), but rather something the dolphin had carried since birth. Nonetheless, it had survived, against the odds, to reach adulthood. It’s possible that the condition hampered its ability to swim at the relentless pace at which bottlenoses typically travel. If so, it would be isolated from the intensely social life of its own kind, and perhaps, as a surrogate, it had joined the whale society. For the next 20 minutes, the whales kept up a constant dialogue with one another, making their ethereal creaking, knocking, and clicking sounds, while periodically the higher-pitched call of the dolphin could be heard. The whales rolled around in the waves at the surface, the smaller members of the pod circling the huge matriarch. Then, even more astonishingly, the whales began some strange kind of game. The matriarch would open her oarlike lower jaw, and one of the smaller whales would swim into her mouth, its head protruding from one side and its tail sticking out the other. The matriarch would then seem to very gently nibble the smaller whale for a second or two. The nibbled whale would swim clear and circle around to join the back of the queue, and another would maneuver into place for a little of the same treatment. The bottlenose joined in the fun as well, swimming into the matriarch’s open jaws for its turn and receiving a toothy squeeze. I remained mesmerized by the encounter long after I’d left the whales to their play; it was an incredible privilege to get a close-up perspective of the remarkable social behavior of this little-understood animal. BACK ON LAND, I pondered what it meant for the whales to be held in the matriarch’s mouth for a moment. Maybe there was some parallel with the grooming behavior of primates. While the immediate role of grooming might be to keep the fur glossy and bug-free, more important is what underlies it, the act of building and securing relationships. Lacking dexterous limbs, of course, the whales can’t do this. Perhaps this was their creative way of physically expressing themselves. TO TIP THE BALANCE IN THEIR FAVOR, ESPECIALLY WHEN HUNTING LARGER AND MORE ELUSIVE PREY, SPERM WHALES COORDINATE AND COOPERATE. 阅览室
54 DISCOVERMAGAZINE.COM Sperm whales live in matrilineal social groups, the core of which is formed by related females, often comprising a grandmother, her daughter, and their offspring. Sons, on the other hand, live in these groups only as juveniles. As they approach sexual maturity, the males break from their social group and adopt a more solitary existence — although it’s not unusual for males to form into loose bachelor groups with one or more other males. The group we saw that day was a fairly typical example of sperm whale society, so it could be that what I’d witnessed was some maternal attention being paid to the family in the form of a strange cetacean embrace. That the dolphin joined in suggested that it understood no threat was involved, while the fact that the matriarch lavished some attention on the dolphin suggests it was an accepted, though perhaps temporary, member of the group. IN MANY WAYS, this unusual partnership raised more questions than it answered. For example, how did the dolphin manage to forage, encumbered as it was by its scoliotic spine? Based on its appearance, it was certainly well fed. It couldn’t be foraging alongside the whales, because the dolphin couldn’t match its adopted family’s prodigious dives. Was it catching its own food? Or were the whales providing for it in some way? Sometimes, sperm whales bring their squid prey to the surface with them. Perhaps the dolphin was able to help itself to morsels. This seems a stretch, but however it was nourishing itself, the dolphin appeared to be an accepted member of the group. It’s a demonstration of the unusual structure of sperm whale society that this could happen. Among many similar mammal groups, to be accepted into the fold you have to be a blood relation. While kinship is important to sperm whales, it’s not the sole determinant of their associations. Genetic examinations of their social bonds reveal that they form long-term relationships with both family members and outsiders. Although the dolphin might have been taking this to an extreme, it suggested a remarkable flexibility on the part of both species. On the final day of the trip we made one last sortie to the whales. Luck was on our side — it had been four days since we’d first met the sperm whale group with the dolphin, and here they were again, the dolphin still very much part of their scene. Weeks later, after we had left this maritime paradise, we heard that our guides had again seen this group, complete with dolphin. This was a longer-term arrangement than I’d imagined; the dolphin was interacting with the whale social group to a surprising degree. If nothing else, it gave us some idea of the extent of the social tendency of both species, the deep-seated drive to seek and remain in company. D Ashley Ward is a professor and director of the Animal Behavior Lab at the University of Sydney, where he researches social behavior, learning, and communication across the animal kingdom. His work has been published in top journals including PNAS, Biological Reviews, and Current Biology. From THE SOCIAL LIVES OF ANIMALS by Ashley Ward. Copyright © 2022. Available from Basic Books, an imprint of Hachette Book Group, Inc.
HISTORY LESSONS 56 DISCOVERMAGAZINE.COM BY HANNAH SEO O n Nov. 30, 1803, military physician Francisco Xavier de Balmis set off from the port of La Coruña in northwest Spain on what would become a three-year mission. On board with him were 22 orphan boys. Their goal: to complete the first global immunization campaign. The world was then riddled with smallpox, which killed one-third of all infected. Though Edward Jenner had discovered in 1797 that pus from a cow’s cowpox blisters could be used as a vaccine, the majority of the world had no access to the inoculation. Cowpox was such a local disease, mostly found in England and occasionally France or Italy, that it was unclear how anyone could scale vaccination to more people. Scientists had yet to discover germ theory, so no one knew what a virus was. They did know that they needed to spread cowpox in order to keep the vaccine alive, but prior methods, like putting active disease material (in other words, pus) from an infected person onto cloth or in a vial and rubbing that into the wound of a recipient, didn’t work over long distances. Taking a whole cow to disease hotspots was equally impractical. Today, such viral material is kept alive by refrigeration — technology and know-how scientists just didn’t have back then. CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT: FRANCISCO PÉREZ/WIKIMEDIA COMMONS; MORPHART CREATION/SHUTTERSTOCK; WIKIMEDIA COMMONS Eventually, Jenner came to the realization that he could remove the cow from the vaccination equation. He discovered that by taking the pus from a vaccinated person’s cowpox blisters and putting it into the arms of others, he could create a “warm chain”: arm-to-arm vaccination. As Jenner was making and publicizing his discoveries, King Charles IV of Spain was watching in horror as family members and millions of people in his colonies were felled by smallpox. He conceived of a grand mission, the Royal Philanthropic Expedition of the Vaccine, which would take the vaccine to the Americas, save his people, and make the Spanish Empire the first with a robust plan against the pox. But the king needed someone to helm the mission, someone who could turn those ideals into reality — a tall order. Balmis was the perfect candidate. The then-50-year-old was a military physician who had spent years abroad studying alternative medicines in Mexico and Central America. He also had just translated the book The Historical and Practical Treatise on the Vaccine by J.L. Moreau de la Sarthe, the most comprehensive study of vaccines The First Global Vaccination Campaign THE MARIA PITA left Spain in 1803 on a first-of-itskind mission to vaccinate the world — or at least the Spanish-held portions of it — against smallpox. Francisco Xavier de Balmis King Charles IV of Spain He conceived of a grand mission, the Royal Philanthropic Expedition of the Vaccine, which would save his people. HOW A MILITARY DOCTOR AND THE KING OF SPAIN USED ORPHANS AND ARM-TO-ARM VACCINATION TO FIGHT SMALLPOX.
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HISTORY LESSONS Manila Apr 15, 1805 La Coruna Nov 30, 1803 ~ Canary Islands Dec 9, 1803 Madrid Sep 7, 1806 Puerto Rico Feb 9, 1804 St. Helena island Jun 12, 1806 Santiago de Chile Jan 21, 1808 Caracas Mar 28, 1804 Cuba Mexico City May 26, 1804 Aug 9, 1804 Quito Jul 16, 1805 Lima May 23, 1806 Cochabamba Jul 21, 1810 Combined Balmis Salvany Grajales 58 DISCOVERMAGAZINE.COM colonists. Balmis and his staff would also distribute copies of his translated book to help educate physicians on the updated science, train doctors to administer the vaccine, and assist in the formation of central vaccination boards at every location. Balmis paired off the boys, vaccinating the first two lads right before the ship disembarked. Their ship, the Maria Pita, then took to the seas. Nine days or so after vaccination, the boys developed the typical cowpox lesions on their bodies. Balmis and his medical crew took the pus from those two children and used it to vaccinate the next two boys, cycling through this routine with each successive pair to keep the vaccine alive. With such a high-stakes mission at hand, Balmis had to vaccinate two boys at a time as insurance that, should something happen to one child, the vaccine would not be lost. The Maria Pita made its way to Puerto Rico, stopping en route at the Canary Islands to vaccinate the Spanish colonies there, and landed on Feb. 9, 1804. It was anticlimactic. By some luck, others had managed to sail active disease material, in the form of encrusted lymph fluid, from England to other nearby islands and then on to Puerto Rico. Most of the population was already vaccinated. So the expedition set off for Venezuela, docking in the nick of time — only one of the vaccinated boys still had active pus blisters from which to draw. Balmis rushed out as soon as they landed, immediately vaccinating 28 local children to at the time, into Spanish from the original French. Balmis heeded the king’s call, and when he learned of Jenner’s arm-to-arm method, knew it was exactly what he needed. He would take the vaccination to the Americas through human bodies. BUT BALMIS couldn’t take adults. Smallpox was so incredibly infectious that any adult alive probably had already lived through the disease, and anyone with existing immunity would fail to develop the blisters needed to harvest more pus and propagate the vaccine. Children were the only subpopulation that could keep the vaccine alive, so Balmis recruited 22 orphan boys, aged 3 to 10 years old. King Charles announced that the crown would take care of all these boys as compensation for their bravery, taking on all expenses related to the boys’ wellbeing and ensuring their schooling until they were old enough to support themselves. In addition to the boys and the regular sailing crew, Balmis had three assistants, two physicians, three nurses, a secretary, and Isabel de Zendala y Gomez, the director of the La Coruña orphanage who served as the boys’ primary caretaker. The expedition would sail to all of Spain’s colonies, but the plan went beyond simply inoculating the FROM TOP: KELLIE JAEGER; J.L. MOREAU DE LA SARTHE/WELLCOME COLLECTION BALMIS CIRCLED THE GLOBE and deputies José Salvany and Manuel Grajales traveled through South America, each inoculating the public and distributing copies of The Historical and Practical Treatise on the Vaccine (below at left), to educate local physicians. But Balmis couldn’t take adults: Smallpox was so incredibly infectious that any adult alive probably had lived through it. The Balmis Expedition
Balmis spent the following months in Cuba, and then different regions of Mexico. Some pockets of the population were already vaccinated, some communities were skeptical of the foreign vaccine, and some regional leaders butted heads with the strong-willed Balmis — this was just seven years before the start of the Mexican War of Independence in 1810, and the people in the New Spain territories were reluctant to cooperate with the Spanish crown. At times it looked like the cowpox vaccine would run dry and the expedition would be cut short. But despite close calls due to stormy weather and travel delays, Balmis persevered with the vaccine intact. At every stop, he made sure always to instruct physicians on how to schedule vaccinations to best keep the reservoir of vaccine alive. After administering the vaccine to a reported 12,000 individuals in Venezuela, Balmis was torn. There was so much more land to cover, both further down in South America, in Mexico to the north, and beyond. For expediency, he decided it best to split the voyage into two: His deputy, José Salvany, would travel down to Colombia, Peru, Ecuador, Bolivia, and the rest of Spanish South America. Balmis would head to Cuba, Mexico, and the Spanish colonies in Asia. And so the Balmis Expedition branched, and the two leaders embarked on their separate legs with new groups of boys — rounded up with the cooperation of local officials, the Catholic Church and family volunteers — as carriers for the vaccine. EDWARD JENNER discovered cowpox could be used to vaccinate against smallpox. Pre-refrigeration, that meant taking pus from one person’s blisters and putting it in another’s arm. SCIENCE HISTORY IMAGES/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO www.ProPlusMed.com Name (Print. 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HISTORY LESSONS 60 DISCOVERMAGAZINE.COM At the time, the Spanish Empire was the largest in the world. They took the vaccine to territories across three continents and two oceans — an amazing example of what can be accomplished when higher-income countries mobilize to help lower-income countries, says Enrique Soto, a geriatric oncologist at the Instituto Nacional de Ciencias Médicas y Nutrición Salvador Zubirán in Mexico City, who has written about the Balmis Expedition. The Royal Philanthropic Expedition of the Vaccine is a storied journey that tells a lot about the history of vaccination campaigns, Soto says, but it also reveals all the lessons we have not learned. Vaccine hesitancy, for example, is not new, which is why clear and proactive science communication is paramount. “If we have the vaccines and people don’t take them, then vaccines are useless,” he says. Soto adds that there are a few parallels between the Balmis Expedition and COVAX, the United Nations’ effort to produce and disseminate COVID-19 tests, treatments, and vaccines globally and equitably. It’s bewildering, he says, that our technology has advanced so much since the 1800s, yet international collaboration and philanthropy is still so difficult to pull off. TO THIS DAY, smallpox is the only infectious disease in humans that has ever been eradicated — a feat managed only through the initiative and action taken by a few pioneers who understood that properly tackling an infectious disease means protecting everyone. The story of the Balmis Expedition is little known, says Soto. But, it should be talked about more, Esparza says, “because the people involved are heroes, and those nurses were the first global public health nurses in history. It is such an amazing story.” D Hannah Seo is a science journalist, writer, and poet based in Brooklyn. Her work can also be found in Scientific American, WIRED, Popular Science, and the podcast 20 Thousand Hertz, among others. keep the cowpox alive. He also helped local authorities set up vaccination institutions to oversee and track the administered doses. Versions of some of those vaccine boards still exist. While records are incomplete, experts today believe the team managed to vaccinate 100,000 to 150,000 people in North and South America. Balmis then headed to the Spanish colonies in the Philippines in February 1805. After repeating his efforts there, he was ready to go home; he sailed east with a small crew and three new boys, stopping to vaccinate Macau (a Portuguese colony) and Canton, and was finally Europe-bound by 1806. AFTER A BRIEF stop at St. Helena island, the worn physician reached his homeland in September. Back in Spain almost three years after he left, Balmis received a warm welcome from King Charles, and mass praise for his efforts. “Balmis conceived of vaccination as public health, and there are people who refer to the Balmis Expedition as the first global public health vaccination campaign,” says José Esparza, a Venezuelan doctor and virologist at the University of Maryland who has researched the expedition extensively. “At that time, vaccination was seen mostly as a means to prevent individual diseases in people, not as a public health enterprise.” The vaccine had often preceded Balmis in different communities, yet none of the places he visited had established mass vaccination initiatives. There had been isolated initiatives, but not an organized vaccination campaign. “Maybe the lesson here is that we must pursue both goals of vaccination,” says Esparza. “Protection of individuals, but also the protection of societies.” Of course, the Balmis Expedition was not done purely out of philanthropy — losing masses of people to smallpox was an economic detriment to the Spanish crown, and by vaccinating non-Spanish territories, Balmis hoped to better international relations. But the vaccine was always free. Often, Balmis even paid families to vaccinate their children. CARONIUM/WIKIMEDIA COMMONS “At that time, vaccination was seen mostly as a means to prevent individual disease ... not as a public health enterprise.” A SCULPTURAL MONUMENT to the Balmis Expedition stands in the port of La Coruña.
Some fifty years ago, on December 14, 1972, human beings left the moon for what turned out to be the final time in the 20th century. The 1969 Apollo 11 moon landing and its successors had fulfilled President John F. Kennedy’s goals “to put a man on the moon,” The successful — yet bittersweet — Apollo 17 mission was the grand finale of the era of one small step for man ... one giant leap for mankind. Now you can honor the 50th anniversary of Apollo 17 with The Apollo 17 $2 Bill from The Bradford Exchange Mint. Scarce collector favorites, genuine U.S. legal tender, $2 bills are rarely seen. They make up fewer than 1% of all currency produced in the United States today. This exclusive limited edition $2 Bill is even more rare. Privately-enhanced by The Bradford Exchange Mint, it showcases fullcolor imagery by renowned American aviation artist Joel Iskowitz. It honors the Apollo 17 mission, and all who believed this mission was just the “end of the beginning” of America’s space explorations. A superb value … 100% guaranteed. Very strong demand is expected for this privately-enhanced, crisp, Uncirculated $2 Bill honoring the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 17 Mission. Order now at the $39.99* price, backed by our unconditional, 365-day guarantee. The count down is beginning — so return the coupon today! PLEASE RESPOND PROMPTLY SEND NO MONEY NOW YES. Please reserve The Apollo 17 $2 Bill for me as described in this announcement. I need send no money now. I will be billed with shipment. Limit: one per order. The Bradford Exchange Mint 9307 Milwaukee Avenue · Niles, IL 60714-9995 Mrs. Mr. Ms. Name (Please Print Clearly) Address City State Zip Email (optional) 911102-E23601 Name (Please Print Clearly) ORDER TODAY AT BRADFORDEXCHANGE.COM/APOLLO17 ©2022 BGE 17-01657-047-BD2022 *Plus a total of $6.99 shipping and service per item. Please allow 4-8 weeks for delivery. Sales subject to product availability and order acceptance. By accepting this reservation you will be enrolled in The All-New U.S. Space Race $2 Bills Collection with the opportunity — never the obligation — to acquire future issues. You may cancel at any time. You’ll also receive a deluxe wooden display box — FREE — with your second shipment. Issues will arrive about once a month. KEY DETAILS An Eagle Landed ... and Changed History Forever APOLLO 17 1972-2022 ★ Genuine Uncirculated U.S. legal tender $2 Bill ★ Privately enhanced with custom artwork honoring the Apollo 17 Mission ★ Secured and protected in a crystal-clear holder New Legal Tender $2 Bill Honors The 50th Anniversary Of The Historic Capstone To The Race To The Moon Legal tender $2 bill honors THE GRAND FINALE OF MANKIND’S FIRST GREAT LEAP INTO SPACE An Eagle Landed ... and Changed History Forever FIRST GREAT LEAP INTO SPACE The Bradford Exchange Mint is not affiliated with the U.S. Mint or U.S. Department of the Treasury.
PIECE OF MIND 62 DISCOVERMAGAZINE.COM BY CAREN CHESLER (Virtual) Reality Check MY SON’S SOCIAL ISOLATION PROMPTED ME TO RECONSIDER VIDEO GAMES — AND SOME DATED RESEARCH ABOUT THEIR INFLUENCE. We vowed not to buy our son an electronic device until he’s 30. So far we’ve stuck to that agreement. M y husband and I were eating out with our son, Eddie, who was then 2, when a couple came in with a young boy wearing headphones and staring at an iPad as he walked. For the entire meal, the boy was glued to his screen while his parents chatted amicably as if he wasn’t there. “What’s the point of having a kid if you’re not going to talk to him?” I said to my husband. We vowed not to buy our son an electronic device until he’s 30. And video games, one of the main reasons children want these devices, would be verboten. So far we’ve stuck to that agreement, though it has not been easy. When other parents would go out for a meal and hand their child a phone, we had to entertain our kid. We brought a knapsack filled with crayons, markers and spiral sketchpads with thick paper. We lugged around Jenga, Uno and Yahtzee. KELLIE JAEGER/DISCOVER We drew pictures and built mini forts out of jelly packets — anything to keep our son off video games, which I saw as the devil’s poison. Indeed, there’s a body of research, like a meta-analysis from October 2018, that shows that kids who play violent video games are more aggressive. Another paper, from September 2020 in The International Encyclopedia of Media Psychology, indicates that repeated exposure can cause desensitization to violence, making people less empathetic. Video games can also be addictive, so addictive that the World Health Organization included a condition called “gaming disorder” in its International Classification of Diseases; the American Psychiatric Association considers it a condition warranting further study. And one 2020 study published in Developmental Psychology tracked 385 adolescents over six years
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PIECE OF MIND 64 DISCOVERMAGAZINE.COM wouldn’t be able to go to friends’ houses because that’s what they do after school, or he would be isolated next to them as they played. Either way, he’d miss out on important bonding. “Don’t do to him what my parents did to me,” my friend said. Her parents forbade her from watching TV and eating sugar, prohibitions that left her clueless about all kinds of cultural references. “They made me feel like a weirdo,” she said. Video games are now such an integral part of the social fabric, not playing them is akin to growing up without a TV, says Nick Bowman, a gaming researcher at Texas Tech University. When people talk about their childhood these days, their memories include playing video games with their parents and siblings. “It’s a family ritual. It’s a friend ritual. The data suggests that those are the things people are going to remember 40 years from now,” he says. Bowman also notes that game research has evolved. For the first 20 years, studies were focused on the potential harms, like addiction and aggression. Today, games are viewed for their art, their teaching potential and their ability to make people feel things. It’s not that video games have no ill effects. But the myopic focus on those ill effects now seems overblown and dated, he says. “They don’t match the reality of the millions upon millions of people who play games every day and don’t experience any of those negative effects,” Bowman says. I DUG DEEPER into the research and saw studies illuminating the benefits of gaming. People who play video games can learn how to make good choices, says James Paul Gee, a linguist at Arizona State University and author of What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy. Most games involve simulations where choices must be made, and players can see the consequences of their decisions, Gee adds: “It turns out that teaching people to make good choices correlates with knowledge. If they know how to make good choices in life or in problem solving, you can give them [any] knowledge test, and they will ace it.” to find that 28 percent of the gamers were prone to increased levels of depression, aggression, shyness and anxiety at the end of that period. That shouldn’t be surprising, says Douglas Gentile, who has studied developmental psychology and media violence for 30 years. Games can have significant influence, and children are impressionable. So whatever the content of the game is, kids are likely to learn it, Gentile says. If it’s a violent game, they may learn aggression skills. And yet, the same is true for beneficial video game elements, such as reading or math. If it’s a pro-social game, they’ll probably learn pro-social skills. “Whatever they practice, they will learn, whether or not they want to,” Gentile says. But the worst problem with gaming, at least for our child, is one I didn’t anticipate: alienation. It took a while for Eddie to make friends at school. Now, in fourth grade, he’s finally forged some bonds, mostly through sports. But in their free time, all his pals play video games, and my son does not. He felt like an outsider before finding these friends, and now my ban is inadvertently keeping him isolated — not just from his classmates but from the rest of modern society, it seems. SOME 76 PERCENT of American kids play video games, according to the Entertainment Software Association, the trade group for the U.S. video game industry. For my son, not only did he miss out on playtime, but he didn’t know how to play. During the pandemic, a classmate had a virtual birthday party, where everyone was invited to play Roblox. My son and I couldn’t even find the virtual room where the game was being played. As I frantically texted other mothers, asking them how we could find his classmates, my son grew angry and then upset. Since then, he has found a way around my ban: He plays video games at friends’ houses. I was initially annoyed, until he came home one day and told me how happy he was to be in the fold. He began to cry, recalling how much he had felt like an outsider. “Now I can play with everyone,” he said. I was out last week with a fellow parent and lamented how I can’t raise my son the way I would like. If I forbid him from playing video games, he KELLIE JAEGER/DISCOVER Playing action games can enhance one’s ability to pick out important information in a cluttered scene.
C. Shawn Green, a cognitive researcher at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, says questioning whether video games are good or bad is like asking, “What are the effects of food on the body?” Different games have different effects on players, some good and some bad. Action games, for instance, can help how we perceive and respond to stimuli around us, his research shows. Because action games require players to react to stimuli anywhere on the screen in a matter of seconds, playing them can enhance one’s ability to pick out important information in a cluttered scene. Players also learn to toggle more quickly from one task to another, a process that can take as much as 200 milliseconds, Green says. “Basically what your brain is doing is switching tasks,” he says. “Playing these types of games diminishes that cost of switching.” ON A RECENT GROCERY RUN, I noticed how the young man at the counter was packing my groceries into paper bags. He did it with such care, making sure he chose the right item and placed it in the bag in the direction that would achieve maximum efficiency. “Do you play Tetris?” I asked. “I do,” he said. He added that he plays a lot of video games. So I asked him the thing I fear most about my son playing: Are the games so exciting and overstimulating that everything else in life seems boring in comparison? He thought about it for a moment, with a pause. Then he said he really wants to become a surgeon — a goal far more important to him than any video game. Interestingly, he added that gaming may help, as his fingers are now so nimble that it has enhanced his suturing skills. Studies bear this out. As I left the store, I wondered if my son had something in life he liked more than video games, something that made real life as exciting as the virtual ones. I knew immediately what it was. It was the company of friends. He’s not addicted to video games. He’s addicted to companionship. But aren’t we all? D Caren Chesler is a writer and essayist based in New Jersey. Questioning whether video games are good or bad is like asking, “What are the effects of food on the body?” EXCLUSIVE from Astronomy magazine! ECLIPSE GLOBE Order your exclusive, limited-edition globe at MyScienceShop.com/EclipseGlobe Sales tax where applicable. P40472 Order your exclusive, limited-edition globe at MyScienceShop.com/EclipseGlobe ï A “Natural Earth” map derived from the latest NASA SRTM Plus elevation data with super imposed eclipse paths using JPL Development Ephemeris 430 ï 32 total eclipses and 5 hybrid eclipses accurately depicted ï Clear acrylic display base ï Bonus eclipse informational guide ECLIPSES FROM 372021 TO 2070! ï A “Natural Earth” map derived from the latest NASA SRTM Plus elevation data with super Explore 50 years of eclipses! Created in partnership with retired NASA astrophysicist and eclipse expert Fred Espenak, the 6-inch Eclipse Globe from Astronomy magazine features eclipses spanning from 2021 to 2070.
BY TIMOTHY MEINCH ALEXIS ROSENFELD/1 OCEAN/UNESCO H opeful news about coral is hard to come by these days. That’s part of the reason images of this extraordinary reef in French Polynesia made the media rounds early this year. Located off the coast of Tahiti, its rose-shaped colonies stretch continuously across nearly 2 miles of seafloor. But at a depth around 150 feet in the South Pacific, the reef DEEP CORAL DISCOVER Magazine (ISSN 0274-7529, USPS No. 555-190) is published bimonthly (January/February, March/April, May/June, July/August, September/October, November/December) by Kalmbach Media Co., 21027 Crossroads Circle, P.O. Box 1612, Waukesha, WI 53187. Periodicals Postage is paid at Waukesha, WI and additional offices. Postmaster: Send address changes to Discover, PO Box 8520, Big Sandy, TX 75755. Canada Post Publication Mail Agreement #40010760. Back issues available. All rights reserved. Nothing herein contained may be reproduced without written permission of Kalmbach Media Co., 21027 Crossroads Circle, P.O. Box 1612, Waukesha, WI 53187-1612. Printed in the U.S.A. remained mostly uncharted until last year, when coral biologist Laetitia Hédouin paid it a visit after a tip from a local dive shop. The combination of its size, depth and pristine quality was startling. “It’s like a treasure,” Hédouin says, describing the mature coral as virtually untouched by climate change. “The question is: How long will it survive?” Studies indicate that coral coverage globally shrunk by half between the 1950s and early 2000s, and some 14 percent of the world’s coral died off between 2009 and 2018, largely due to warming seas and ongoing bleaching events. Hédouin partnered with UNESCO to document and study this thriving Tahiti reef in late 2021. Notably, the team of researchers and photographers documented some of the same species that are threatened in shallower reefs, suggesting these lesser-explored, mesophotic reefs — those deeper than 100 feet, where sunlight is limited — could play a vital RESEARCHERS say this thriving reef near Tahiti is one of the largest healthy mesophotic reefs known to scientists. role in preserving coral. And scientists don’t really know how many healthy mesophotic reefs are hiding in our oceans’ depths. Advancements in dive technology are shifting that. Hédouin says rebreather gear in this latest expedition allowed divers to recycle their air and extend time at depth four times longer than conventional diving. Changes in the affordability and safety of such tools are expanding ocean research possibilities. D PLANET EARTH #ScienceIRL
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