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As the human population expands, we are going to have to find better ways to feed ourselves without further decimating the environment.Photograph by Koldunova Anna / Shutterstock In his new book, The Butterfly Effect: Insects and the Making of the Modern World, Edward Melillo calls some insects “little laboratories,” the various productions of which have supported our material world for millennia. The “butterfly effect” refers, of course, to chaos theory and a 1972 talk, from Edward Lorenz, on whether the flap of a butterfly’s wings in Brazil could set off a tornado in Texas. The term captures interconnectivity among seemingly separate or disparate phenomena. In The Butterfly Effect, Melillo, a professor of history and environmental studies at Amherst College, brings up what meteorologists call “teleconnections.” For example, when El Nino storm events off the coast of Peru provoke extreme weather clear across the planet. He delves into connections like this… Read More »Why We Should Eat Crickets. And Other Bug Ideas – Facts So Romantic

Since its publication in 1859, Darwin’s On the Origin of Species has been read as a blow to the hubris of Homo sapiens. We aren’t God’s final and most perfect creation, after all, but merely one more product of the same evolutionary process that gave rise to apes, lampreys, and limpets. In his eulogy to Darwin, delivered in 1882, the German physiologist Emil du Bois-Reymond put it concisely: “Darwin seems to me to be the Copernicus of the organic world.” Just as Copernicus had displaced man from the center of celestial orbits, Darwin had toppled him from the pinnacle of “animated beings.” Du Bois-Reymond’s analogy gained broad intellectual currency, and in fact it is often misattributed to Sigmund Freud, who appropriated it with just a wee bit of vainglory, adding psychoanalysis as “the third and most bitter blow” to humanity’s “naive self-love.” Just for the record, since I am about… Read More »The Human Error Darwin Inspired – Issue 90: Something Green

As the human population expands, we are going to have to find better ways to feed ourselves without further decimating the environment.Photograph by Koldunova Anna / Shutterstock In his new book, The Butterfly Effect: Insects and the Making of the Modern World, Edward Melillo calls some insects “little laboratories,” the various productions of which have supported our material world for millennia. The “butterfly effect” refers, of course, to chaos theory and a 1972 talk, from Edward Lorenz, on whether the flap of a butterfly’s wings in Brazil could set off a tornado in Texas. The term captures interconnectivity among seemingly separate or disparate phenomena. In The Butterfly Effect, Melillo, a professor of history and environmental studies at Amherst College, brings up what meteorologists call “teleconnections.” For example, when El Nino storm events off the coast of Peru provoke extreme weather clear across the planet. He delves into connections like this… Read More »Why We Should Eat Crickets. And Other Bug Ideas – Facts So Romantic

Since its publication in 1859, Darwin’s On the Origin of Species has been read as a blow to the hubris of Homo sapiens. We aren’t God’s final and most perfect creation, after all, but merely one more product of the same evolutionary process that gave rise to apes, lampreys, and limpets. In his eulogy to Darwin, delivered in 1882, the German physiologist Emil du Bois-Reymond put it concisely: “Darwin seems to me to be the Copernicus of the organic world.” Just as Copernicus had displaced man from the center of celestial orbits, Darwin had toppled him from the pinnacle of “animated beings.” Du Bois-Reymond’s analogy gained broad intellectual currency, and in fact it is often misattributed to Sigmund Freud, who appropriated it with just a wee bit of vainglory, adding psychoanalysis as “the third and most bitter blow” to humanity’s “naive self-love.” Just for the record, since I am about… Read More »The Human Error Darwin Inspired – Issue 90: Something Green

Last week, biologist and writer Merlin Sheldrake introduced Nautilus readers to Paul Stamets, a mycologist who preaches that mushrooms can save the world. “Give him an insoluble problem and he’ll toss you a new way it can be decomposed, poisoned, or healed by a fungus,” Sheldrake writes. Sheldrake focused on Stamets’ solution for colony collapse disorder, feeding bees a fungal potion that can squelch a virus they may carry from environmental toxins. Some of Stamets’ other mushroom remedies dissolve petroleum waste and transform cardboard boxes into tree seeds. Stamets is fast at work on how a fungal extract might treat COVID-19. After reading Sheldrake’s profile, we got to wondering how Stamets’ magic mushrooms could improve the consciousness of Earth’s most damning species: humans. We’ve all read, and perhaps experienced, how psilocybin rewires our brains, and so were anxious to hear what the “fungal evangelist” had to say about the environmental… Read More »How Psilocybin Can Save the Environment – Issue 90: Something Green

Eugene Rosenberg, a coral microbiologist, ran into a rather large problem in the early 2000s. While working at the University of Tel Aviv in Israel, he discovered that he couldn’t replicate his own breakthrough findings from a decade earlier. What seemed like a potentially devastating failure at the time would lead Rosenberg to a new way of thinking about evolution. In the 1990s, he’d discovered a driver of coral disease. Rising ocean temperatures had begun to cause coral bleaching in the Eastern Mediterranean. No one really understood why bleaching occurred, only that if a coral polyp remained without its algae for too long, it could starve and die. Some argued that polyps expelled algae because, at higher temperatures, the stressed algae stopped contributing to the symbiosis. They became, in a sense, unproductive employees, and were summarily fired. But after a series of experiments, Rosenberg had come to a different conclusion.… Read More »When Evolution Is Infectious – Issue 90: Something Green

The first artificial neural networks weren’t abstractions inside a computer, but actual physical systems made of whirring motors and big bundles of wire. Here I’ll describe how you can build one for yourself using SnapCircuits, a kid’s electronics kit. I’ll also muse about how to build a network that works optically using a webcam. And I’ll recount what I learned talking to the artist Ralf Baecker, who built a network using strings, levers, and lead weights. I showed the SnapCircuits network last year to John Hopfield, a Princeton University physicist who pioneered neural networks in the 1980s, and he quickly got absorbed in tweaking the system to see what he could get it to do. I was a visitor at the Institute for Advanced Study and spent hours interviewing Hopfield for my forthcoming book on physics and the mind. Author George Musser (left) shows physicist John Hopfield (right) the SnapCircuits… Read More »Build Your Own Artificial Neural Network. It’s Easy! – Facts So Romantic

If anyone knows about going fungal, it’s Paul Stamets. I have often wondered whether he has been infected with a fungus that fills him with mycological zeal—and an irrepressible urge to persuade humans that fungi are keen to partner with us in new and peculiar ways. I went to visit him at his home on the west coast of Canada. The house is balanced on a granite bluff, looking out to sea. The roof is suspended on beams that look like mushroom gills. A Star Trek fan since the age of 12, Stamets christened his new house Starship Agarikon—agarikon is another name for Laricifomes officinalis, a medicinal wood-rotting fungus that grows in the forests of the Pacific Northwest. “Oh my god.” Stamets woke up. “I think I know how to save the bees.” I’ve known Stamets since I was a teenager. Every time I see him I’m met with a… Read More »The Fungal Evangelist Who Would Save the Bees – Issue 90: Something Green

Most of us are familiar with the much-maligned Western diet and its mainstay of processed food products found in the middle aisles of the grocery store. Some of us beeline for the salty chips and others for the sugar-packed cereals. But we are not the only ones eating junk food. An awful lot of crops grown in the developed world eat a botanical version of this diet—main courses of conventional fertilizers with pesticide sides. It’s undeniable that crops raised on fertilizers have produced historical yields. After all, the key ingredients of most fertilizers—nitrogen (N), phosphorus (P), and potassium (K)—make plants grow faster and bigger. And popular insecticides and herbicides knock back plant enemies. From 1960 to 2000, a time when the world’s population doubled, global grain production rose even more quickly. It tripled.1 But there is a trade-off. High-yielding crops raised on a steady diet of fertilizers appear to have… Read More »Junk Food Is Bad For Plants, Too – Issue 90: Something Green

Let’s start all over again about face masks. The noise about them is a Judas Priest blare. Can we turn down the volume for a moment? OK, good, thanks. Now, let’s talk about their value. Why there is such discord about them. After all, what has the clamor wrought? Nothing good, says Monica Gandhi, a professor of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco, and associate division chief of the Division of HIV, Infectious Diseases, and Global Medicine. Gandhi has experienced the racket firsthand. In June she published a study, “Masks Do More Than Protect Others During COVID-19,” which discusses “for one of the first times the hypothesis that universal masking reduces the ‘inoculum’ or dose of the virus for the mask-wearer, leading to more mild and asymptomatic infection” rates. When the study was publicized, Gandhi’s Twitter account was stoned with hate. “I got so many anti-masker comments,” she… Read More »The Importance of Face Masks and the Tragedy of Downplaying Them – Issue 90: Something Green