The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2020

by Michio Kaku

  Ancestral spiders offer another surprise. In early 2018, Wang and Huang Diying, a researcher at NIGPAS, separately published specimens in Nature Ecology & Evolution with spiderlike bodies trailed by long, scorpionesque tails. Now extinct, those arachnids were holdouts from a very early branch of spider evolution thought to have died out by some 250 million years ago. But in what is now Myanmar, they once crawled alongside the true spiders that persist today. Those proto-spiders also had silk-spinning organs, evidence that even early arachnids had that power.

  Of all those riches, the most important may look lackluster: little beetles coated in dots of pollen. They are a clue to a dramatic and quick changeover in life’s history that Charles Darwin called “an abominable mystery”: the emergence of the flowering plants, which mostly rely on insect visitors to carry their pollen. Other amber specimens from the same ancient forest show pollen from an older group of trees, the gymnosperms—​conifers and ginkgoes—​which today are pollinated largely by wind. But some of the pollen on the beetles looks too big to be windblown. The amber, it seems, may capture the moment when many insect groups switched their feeding from gymnosperms to flowering plants, touching off the millions of years of coevolution that led to the extraordinary diversity of flowers and their pollinators today.

  Studying the evolution of that partnership should help researchers understand why insect groups thrive or fail—​a crucial question at a time when entomologists have begun to worry that ongoing climate change could drive a wave of insect extinctions, says paleoentomologist Michael Engel of the University of Kansas in Lawrence. “Burmese amber fits perfectly into this grand, unfortunate, tragic experiment that is going on with the world right now,” Engel says.

  * * *

  After perusing the outdoor stalls here, Xing moves from shop to shop, sitting down at one elegant tea table after another to chat with owners. Under jewelry store glass counters, these shops showcase ferns, flowers, scorpions, fearsome spiders, and one tiny pinecone. New specimens emerge from the back in plastic bags. One shop even offers a baby bird, its delicate wing—​with its telltale claw—​clearly visible. But the dealer is asking about $145,000—​too much.

  By day’s end, Xing’s student has a padded backpack full of invertebrates in plastic cases, as well as the lizards. Next, Xing flies to the nearby major city of Kunming, China, to meet with Xiao Jia, a wealthy private collector and online dealer who lent him that first snake in a piece of amber for study.

  Along the way, the hustle never stops. After Xiao’s driver picks Xing up from the airport, his phone buzzes: a dealer in Myitkyina wants to sell what may be the first fragment of a beehive in amber.

  Xing discusses buying it with Xiao. If neither of them grabs that specimen, someone else in the same small, deep-pocketed circle might—​like Xia Fangyuan, a collector, dealer, and enthusiastic co-author on about a dozen high-profile papers, who lives across the country in Shanghai, China, and competes with Xing for top specimens. Xia says he spends roughly $750,000 on Burmese amber per year, and grateful scientists like Wang have named species of cockroach, froghopper, parasitoid fly, and caddisfly for him. His vast collection, stored in a bank vault and brought out for visitors at his home, includes a bird, lizards, and a frog. His favorite specimen, he says, is a perfectly preserved insect: a praying mantis he bought for $22,000 that looks like it could cock its head at any moment.

  Xia’s collection also includes a curious shell bought from a dealer who claimed it was a snail. Suspecting that the specimen was something more, he lent it to Wang, who did a CT scan that revealed the internal chambers characteristic of an ammonite—​an extinct marine cephalopod resembling a nautilus. The remarkable seashell must have been caught in resin in a beachside forest, perhaps after it was thrown onto land in a storm. Described in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences(PNAS) last week, the specimen remains in Xia’s private collection.

  That arrangement isn’t unusual. Chinese collectors hesitate to give specimens to museums outright, Wang says, because China’s laws don’t offer tax breaks for such donations. But some Western paleontologists are uncomfortable with publishing fossils that remain in private hands. A simple loan of a specimen isn’t enough to ensure its long-term preservation or that other researchers can visit and study it for decades and centuries to come. “The whole point of science is that we’re generating and testing hypotheses,” Rayfield says. “If we’re not able to study specimens anymore, then it simply becomes an exercise at taking someone at their word.”

  And yet PNAS is far from the only journal to have published specimens from China’s private Burmese amber collections. Science Advances (part of the Science family of journals) has also published papers on specimens belonging to Xia, as well as on the amber snake, now housed in an exhibit in the back of Xiao’s toy store in a Kunming mall. (Xiao and DIP have arranged for the institute to own that specimen, but it is loaned back to Xiao until 2027.)

  Pressed on the status of their specimens, both Xiao and Xia—​and the scientists with whom they collaborate—​say they plan to turn their collections into private museums and that they are committed to accepting requests for study from outside researchers. The PNAS paper lists the ammonite specimen, for example, as belonging to the Lingpoge Amber Museum in Shanghai, an institution that Xia says he is preparing. He says he is negotiating with his district-level government for space. Asked whether that situation meets their policies, the PNAS editorial board issued a written response: “The authors of this article have assured us that the fossil will be made available to qualified researchers.”

  Experience leaves some amber researchers wary, however. Engel recalls once asking to visit a published specimen from an amber deposit in Jordan. It was housed in what seemed to be a museum that turned out to be run by a collector. “It was basically his basement,” Engel says. “He says, ‘Oh yeah, sure you can examine it—​for $10,000.’”

  Yet the allure of the amber fossils may grow, regardless of ownership—​because of scarcity. The supply of amber is far down from its height around 2015, dealers say. As quickly as that window into the Cretaceous opened, it might already be slamming shut.

  * * *

  In June 2017, helicopters from Myanmar’s army buzzed over Tanai. According to news reports, they dropped leaflets warning amber miners and other residents to flee. Airstrikes and roadblocks followed, and Myanmar’s army has since pried away the amber mining areas from the Kachin Independence Army. A 2018 report by a United Nations investigator indicated that the actions killed four civilians and trapped up to 5,000 people in the area. Citing the army’s broader conduct, including in Kachin, another UN fact-finding report called for Myanmar’s top generals to be investigated for genocide and crimes against humanity.

  Two former mine owners, speaking through an interpreter in phone interviews, say taxes have been even steeper since government troops took control of the area. Both shut their mines when they became unprofitable after the government takeover, and almost all deep mines are now out of business, dealers here corroborate. Only shallow mines and perhaps a few secret operations are still running.

  Tracing how revenue from amber funds Myanmar’s army and ethnic militias is hard. “As a consumer,” says Donowitz, “by increasing the values of those commodities, by participating in those trades, you are part of that conflict.”

  That’s not the only ethical cloud over these specimens. Many fossil-rich nations, including China, Canada, Mongolia—​and Myanmar—​have written laws to keep unique fossils inside their borders. Myanmar’s rules threaten violators with five to ten years in prison, thousands of dollars in fines, or both. As Burmese amber fossils slip through the gemstone loophole, “It’s like Myanmar’s cultural heritage, paleontological heritage, is just being wholesale ripped out of the ground and distributed around the world,” Engel says.

  Xing stresses he wants to extract scientific details, not to own specimens. He says he’s sensitive to the issue because m
any Chinese historical objects now sit in foreign museums. “If one day Myanmar gets peace, and they want to build a museum for amber or build a museum for natural history, [Xing’s own institute] would love to return all the specimens to Myanmar,” he says. “It’s not going to come free. But yeah, we’d love to return them.”

  Some paleontologists also hope to see a Burmese amber collection near the mines or at least within the country’s borders. “If Myanmar wanted to build a museum about amber,” Grimaldi says, “it would be totally fun to lend my expertise in helping to design and build that. It would be magnificent, and I think it should be done.” In recent months, one private amber museum opened in Yangon, Myanmar’s largest city. But in addition to education, its English website also offers amber lots for sale, custom jewelry and fossil procurement, and escorted buying tours to amber markets, suggesting the museum is about commerce as well as preservation.

  For residents in Tanai, questions about who owns fossils pale in the face of day-to-day security issues. “Right now there is no stability and no rule of law,” says one out-of-work miner in a phone call.

  But as the formal interview ends, he has a request. He says the miners digging up the amber don’t know why scientists care about the insects and other creatures entombed inside it. “If you know,” he says, “please share with us?”

  JOSHUA SOKOL

  The Hidden Heroines of Chaos

  from Quanta Magazine

  A little over half a century ago, chaos started spilling out of a famous experiment. It came not from a petri dish, a beaker, or an astronomical observatory, but from the vacuum tubes and diodes of a Royal McBee LGP-30. This “desk” computer—​it was the size of a desk—​weighed some 800 pounds and sounded like a passing propeller plane. It was so loud that it even got its own office on the fifth floor in Building 24, a drab structure near the center of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Instructions for the computer came from down the hall, from the office of a meteorologist named Edward Norton Lorenz.

  The story of chaos is usually told like this: Using the LGP-30, Lorenz made paradigm-wrecking discoveries. In 1961, having programmed a set of equations into the computer that would simulate future weather, he found that tiny differences in starting values could lead to drastically different outcomes. This sensitivity to initial conditions, later popularized as the butterfly effect, made predicting the far future a fool’s errand. But Lorenz also found that these unpredictable outcomes weren’t quite random, either. When visualized in a certain way, they seemed to prowl around a shape called a strange attractor.

  About a decade later, chaos theory started to catch on in scientific circles. Scientists soon encountered other unpredictable natural systems that looked random even though they weren’t: the rings of Saturn, blooms of marine algae, Earth’s magnetic field, the number of salmon in a fishery. Then chaos went mainstream with the publication of James Gleick’s Chaos: Making a New Science in 1987. Before long, Jeff Goldblum, playing the chaos theorist Ian Malcolm, was pausing, stammering, and charming his way through lines about the unpredictability of nature in Jurassic Park.

  All told, it’s a neat narrative. Lorenz, “the father of chaos,” started a scientific revolution on the LGP-30. It is quite literally a textbook case for how the numerical experiments that modern science has come to rely on—​in fields ranging from climate science to ecology to astrophysics—​can uncover hidden truths about nature.

  But in fact, Lorenz was not the one running the machine. There’s another story, one that has gone untold for half a century. A year and a half ago, an MIT scientist happened across a name he had never heard before and started to investigate. The trail he ended up following took him into the MIT archives, through the stacks of the Library of Congress, and across three states and five decades to find information about the women who, today, would have been listed as co-authors on that seminal paper. And that material, shared with Quanta, provides a fuller, fairer account of the birth of chaos.

  The Birth of Chaos

  In the fall of 2017, the geophysicist Daniel Rothman, co-director of MIT’s Lorenz Center, was preparing for an upcoming symposium. The meeting would honor Lorenz, who died in 2008, so Rothman revisited Lorenz’s epochal paper, a masterwork on chaos titled “Deterministic Nonperiodic Flow.” Published in 1963, it has since attracted thousands of citations, and Rothman, having taught this foundational material to class after class, knew it like an old friend. But this time he saw something he hadn’t noticed before. In the paper’s acknowledgments, Lorenz had written, “Special thanks are due to Miss Ellen Fetter for handling the many numerical computations.”

  “Jesus . . . who is Ellen Fetter?” Rothman recalls thinking at the time. “It’s one of the most important papers in computational physics and, more broadly, in computational science,” he said. And yet he couldn’t find anything about this woman. “Of all the volumes that have been written about Lorenz, the great discovery—​nothing.”

  With further online searches, however, Rothman found a wedding announcement from 1963. Ellen Fetter had married John Gille, a physicist, and changed her name. A colleague of Rothman’s then remembered that a graduate student named Sarah Gille had studied at MIT in the 1990s in the very same department as Lorenz and Rothman. Rothman reached out to her, and it turned out that Sarah Gille, now a physical oceanographer at the University of California, San Diego, was Ellen and John’s daughter. Through this connection, Rothman was able to get Ellen Gille, née Fetter, on the phone. And that’s when he learned another name, the name of the woman who had preceded Fetter in the job of programming Lorenz’s first meetings with chaos: Margaret Hamilton.

  When Margaret Hamilton arrived at MIT in the summer of 1959, with a freshly minted math degree from Earlham College, Lorenz had only recently bought and taught himself to use the LGP-30. Hamilton had no prior training in programming either. Then again, neither did anyone else at the time. “He loved that computer,” Hamilton said. “And he made me feel the same way about it.”

  For Hamilton, these were formative years. She recalls being out at a party at 3 or 4 a.m., realizing that the LGP-30 wasn’t set to produce results by the next morning, and rushing over with a few friends to start it up. Another time, frustrated by all the things that had to be done to make another run after fixing an error, she devised a way to bypass the computer’s clunky debugging process. To Lorenz’s delight, Hamilton would take the paper tape that fed the machine, roll it out the length of the hallway, and edit the binary code with a sharp pencil. “I’d poke holes for ones, and I’d cover up with Scotch tape the others,” she said. “He just got a kick out of it.”

  There were desks in the computer room, but because of the noise, Lorenz, his secretary, his programmer, and his graduate students all shared the other office. The plan was to use the desk computer, then a total novelty, to test competing strategies of weather prediction in a way you couldn’t do with pencil and paper.

  First, though, Lorenz’s team had to do the equivalent of catching the Earth’s atmosphere in a jar. Lorenz idealized the atmosphere in twelve equations that described the motion of gas in a rotating, stratified fluid. Then the team coded them in.

  Sometimes the “weather” inside this simulation would simply repeat like clockwork. But Lorenz found a more interesting and more realistic set of solutions that generated weather that wasn’t periodic. The team set up the computer to slowly print out a graph of how one or two variables—​say, the latitude of the strongest westerly winds—​changed over time. They would gather around to watch this imaginary weather, even placing little bets on what the program would do next.

  And then one day it did something really strange. This time they had set up the printer not to make a graph, but simply to print out time stamps and the values of a few variables at each time. As Lorenz later recalled, they had rerun a previous weather simulation with what they thought were the same starting values, reading off the earlier numbers from the previous printout. But
those weren’t actually the same numbers. The computer was keeping track of numbers to six decimal places, but the printer, to save space on the page, had rounded them to only the first three decimal places.

  After the second run started, Lorenz went to get coffee. The new numbers that emerged from the LGP-30 while he was gone looked at first like the ones from the previous run. This new run had started in a very similar place, after all. But the errors grew exponentially. After about two months of imaginary weather, the two runs looked nothing alike. This system was still deterministic, with no random chance intruding between one moment and the next. Even so, its hair-trigger sensitivity to initial conditions made it unpredictable.

  This meant that in chaotic systems the smallest fluctuations get amplified. Weather predictions fail once they reach some point in the future because we can never measure the initial state of the atmosphere precisely enough. Or, as Lorenz would later present the idea, even a seagull flapping its wings might eventually make a big difference to the weather. (In 1972, the seagull was deposed when a conference organizer, unable to check back about what Lorenz wanted to call an upcoming talk, wrote his own title that switched the metaphor to a butterfly.)

  Many accounts, including the one in Gleick’s book, date the discovery of this butterfly effect to 1961, with the paper following in 1963. But in November 1960, Lorenz described it during the Q&A session following a talk he gave at a conference on numerical weather prediction in Tokyo. After his talk, a question came from a member of the audience: “Did you change the initial condition just slightly and see how much different results were?”

  “As a matter of fact, we tried that out once with the same equation to see what could happen,” Lorenz said. He then started to explain the unexpected result, which he wouldn’t publish for three more years. “He just gives it all away,” Rothman said now. But no one at the time registered it enough to scoop him.