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 CONTENTS
ASK US
ANY THING
7 How a little dirt in
your space can make
kids healthier

8 A short list of dis-

gusting things you
occasionally swallow

9 These laboratory
screwups led to some
amazing inventions

10 The source of green

energy lurking in your
kitchen trash

12 Everything you need

to know about avoid-
ing body odor

13 Unraveling the tan-

gle of information that
DNA packs into helixes

14 Four smart sugges-

tions for cleaning up
the internet

F E AT U R E S
16 Meet the scientists
mapping dust’s deadly
spread across the
Southwest—and plot-
ting how to stop it

24 Six projects, from 56 Reinventing the 78 Choose the perfect The menagerie of
radical to practical, humble traffic light to pressure washer to at- insects in this amber
to banish space junk open up city streets tack the gunkiest tasks specimen is among
the tiny vignettes
32 The tufted dish 62 The jewel-like mau- 80 A robot vacuum stuck in time at the
scrubber at the center soleums that provide clever enough to side- American Museum
of marine biology glimpses of the past step every pet owner’s of Natural History.
worst nightmare
38 Dirty work: sci- 74 From the archive: PHOTOGRAPH BY
ence’s absolute how US labs came to JARREN VINK
smelliest, stickiest, love furry white rats
slimiest jobs

48 A Colorado cave
GOODS
so extreme its resi- 76 Six soaps for any
dents could contain situation, from greasy
precious medicine hands to bug bites

COVER ART BY YASU + JUNKO POPSCI.COM / SPRING 2022 3

POPSCI.COM / SPRING 2022
FROM THE EDITOR
I STILL REMEMBER my first oxymoron. I
GIMME
was sitting cross-legged on the living room
floor watching The Joy of Painting on PBS
THE DIRT when Bob Ross uttered the phrase “happy
accidents.” I cocked my 5-year-old head to
one side, puzzling over the implication that I
could somehow feel good about spilled milk,
scraped knees, and broken eyeglasses. But
watching him wield a palette knife to scrape
the shape of a stream over some rough,
low-lying shrubs, I soon understood what he
was getting at: that we can find ways to turn
our mistakes into gold.
There’s just one problem with the bushy-
haired painter’s catchphrase: The accident
itself isn’t what’s making happiness. We’re
CORINNE IOZZIO
the ones who embrace the error and make
something splendid happen—be it by turn-
ing a clumsy brushstroke into a peaceful
stream or, somewhat famously, finding pen-
icillin in neglected petri dishes. That’s why,
as an adult and an editor, I’ve instead ad-
opted the (admittedly cringeworthy) phrase
“problem-tunity” for such events.
Of course, that thinking applies to almost
every story we’ve published here at PopSci in
our nearly 150 years of existence. The most
impressive innovations are those that stand
to solve our most pressing problems, and
those hurdles are, more often than not, the
results of our own missteps. That last bit is
what we’re often tempted to shy away from.
Instead, this issue posits, we should relish
looking closely at the messes themselves for
insights and inspiration. Sarah Scoles finds
one inside a toxically sulfuric cave, where ex-
plorers find extremophile worms that could
unlock future antibiotics. Virginia Gewin
chronicles another as she follows efforts to
trace the spread of dust in the US South-
west in the hope that new insights will lead
to better management. Sara Kiley Watson
meanwhile sniffs out the reality of turning
our heaps of methane- belching trash into
energy. And Leigh Cowart spotlights 10
of science’s filthiest jobs—from mosquito
feeder to maggot farmer.
Reveling in all that dirt, gunk, and funk is
good for us (literally: It’s called the hygiene
hypothesis, and we get into that too), so why
sweep it under the proverbial rug? We can
clean up messes—we should and we will—
but that doesn’t mean we can’t find out what
our spills and stains have to tell us first.
STAN HORACZEK
 POPSCI.COM / SPRING 2022 5

SPRING 2022 Vol. 294, No. 1 OUR TWO CENTS

Editor-in-Chief Corinne Iozzio

Design Director Russ Smith
Executive Editor Rachel Feltman
Managing Editor Jean McKenna

Deputy Editor Purbita Saha

DIY Editor John Kennedy
Technology Editor Rob Verger
Features Editor Susan Murcko
Digital Edition Editor Chuck Squatriglia
Engagement Editor Ryan Perry
Associate Editors Jessica Boddy,
Sandra Gutierrez G., Lauren J. Young
Staff Writer Philip Kiefer
Assistant Editors Charlotte Hu,
Sara Kiley Watson
Copy Editor S.B. Kleinman THE MESSES
Researchers Stephanie Abramson,
Cadence Bambenek, Jake Bittle,
Ethan Corey, Carolyn Shea WE CAN’T RESIST
Interns Maggie Galloway, Shi En Kim

Executive Editor, Gear & Reviews Stan Horaczek

Reviews Editor Mike Epstein
CLEANING UP
Associate Managing Editor Tony Ware
Editorial Assistant Quinn Gawronski

ART AND PRODUCTION

Art Director Katie Belloff
Photography Director John Toolan
Production Manager Glenn Orzepowski

CONTRIBUTING EDITORS
I used to love polish- My dog loves a Unlike most chores,
Brooke Borel, Kat Eschner, Tom Foster,
ing old silver as a kid. good mess—a run in I find washing dishes
William Gurstelle, Gregory Mone, Sarah Scoles,
P.W. Singer, Nick Stockton, James Vlahos The chemicals were the river or a dig in to be a very medita-
dangerous enough the woods. He’s less tive experience. That
OPERATIONS
to be exciting, and I fond of baths, but I said, my technique
General Manager Adam Morath
got the immediate don’t mind washing is very enthusiastic,
gratification of tar- him—he’s adorable so I often walk away
nish turning to shine. when he’s cranky. with a wet shirt.
Chief Executive Officer Lance Johnson
Chief Revenue Officer Matt Young Rachel Feltman, Sara Kiley Watson, Mike Epstein,
SVP, Memberships and Premium Programs executive editor assistant editor reviews editor
Michael Sacks
SVP, Strategic Parnerships Julie Smartz
VP of Finance Garrett Hesley
VP, Head of Advertising Sales Daniel Horowitz
VP of Sales John Graney
Head of Brand Alessandra De Benedetti My favorite part of Every Friday, I clean Cleaning out the lint
Head of Consumer Revenue Kristen Ong
playing video games my laptop. First trap in the dryer is
Communications Director Cathy Hebert
where you collect digitally—clearing oh so satisfying. It’s
POPULAR SCIENCE magazine (ISSN 161-7370) is published quarterly by items is tidying up in- the cache, deleting almost like emptying
Recurrent Ventures, 701 Brickell Ave, Ste 1550, Miami, FL 33131. Copyright
©2022 by Recurrent Ventures. All rights reserved. Reprinting in whole ventory. I’ll take it all, old files, emptying the vacuum, but less
or part is forbidden except by permission of Recurrent Ventures.

FOR CUSTOMER SERVICE AND SUBSCRIPTION QUESTIONS, such as

lug it back to my the trash—and then messy because the
renewals, address changes, email preferences, billing, and account status, base, and sort or sell by wiping the screen static creates a neat
go to popsci.com/cs. You can also call 800-289-9399 or 515-237-3697,
or write to Popular Science, P.O. Box 6364, Harlan, IA 51593-1864. it as required. and keyboard. little slab of filth.
Occasionally, we make portions of our subscriber list available to
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please advise us at 515-237-3697.
DIY editor digital edition editor deputy editor
 ARE THERE GOOD VIRUSES? / GET A GOOD

BRAINWASH / WHAT DOES SPACE SMELL LIKE? /

MOON ALLERGIES / WHAT CAUSES SIDE STITCHES? /

TOXIC ANIMAL BOYFRIENDS / WHAT WOULD

HAPPEN IF YOU FELL INTO A BLACK HOLE? / THE

POTATO KING / WHAT DID DINOSAURS TASTE LIKE? /

EGGS GONE WRONG / WHY CAN’T WE SEE MORE

COLORS? / FLYING SNAKES / CAN YOU BOOST YOUR

IMMUNE SYSTEM? / HOT DOG SPORTS / CAN STRESS

KILL YOU? / IMMORTAL JELLYFISH / WHAT IS

A SUPER CAR? / MURDEROUS SQUIRRELS

POPULAR SCIENCE POPULAR SCIENCE

THE
ASK W EIRDEST
US THING I
ANYTHING LEARNED
THIS WEEK

...and more! Get the answers to your most outlandish

questions and fall down science’s strangest rabbit holes on
Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever else you listen.

ASK US ANYTHING
ILLUSTRATION BY IGNAS KRAKYS
LITTLE Q
SHOULD I WORRY ABOUT
MY CHILD BEING DIRTY?
BY JESSE GREENSPAN
LEFT TO THEIR OWN DEVICES, most chil-
dren won’t hesitate to, say, lick a doorknob or
wipe snot with their sleeve. But is there any
truth to the idea that their affinity for getting
dirty can be beneficial to their health?
That theory dates to the 1800s, when Euro-
pean doctors realized that farmers suffered
fewer allergies than city slickers. However, it
GOOD GERMS // I ATE WHAT? // HAPPY ACCIDENTS //
DON’T SMELL BAD // THE POWER OF GARBAGE //
HOW DNA GETS IN KNOTS // HEALTHIER INTERNET
didn’t gain widespread attention until 1989,
when British epidemiologist David Strachan
discovered that youngsters with older siblings
were less susceptible than other kids to hay fe-
ver and eczema. Strachan suggested that early
childhood infections “transmitted by unhygienic
contact” helped foster a robust immune system.
His theory, called the hygiene hypothesis,
POPSCI.COM / SPRING 2022 7
provides a convenient explanation for why al-
lergies and asthma, as well as autoimmune
disorders like multiple sclerosis and Crohn’s
disease, have increased 300 percent or more in
the US since the 1950s. Maybe Western societ-
ies have become too clean for their own good,
and parents too fearful of a little dirt. “What-
ever it is that’s happening in the modern world,
it’s causing the immune system to be active
when it doesn’t need to be,” says microbiologist
Graham Rook of University College London.
As Rook notes, however, the hygiene hy-
pothesis has its flaws. For example, some viral
infections appear to trigger asthma, not pre-
vent it. Most research now blames changes in
the human microbiome, not a dearth of child-
hood infection, for at least some of the sharp
rise in chronic diseases, from digestive disor-
ders to kidney failure.
Getting a bit messy can help cultivate the
thousands of microbial species that call the
body home and keep it healthy. Providing that
boost can be as easy as having pets, tending
chickens, or playing in a green space. In fact,
a 2020 study published in Science Advances
found that when daycare centers in Finland
replaced gravel yards with soil and vegeta-
tion, tykes saw almost immediate benefits to
their immune systems, including an increase
in disease-fighting T-cells. Eating a varied
diet high in fiber helps too. And vaginal child-
birth and breastfeeding promote healthy guts
in newborns and nursing babies.
It’s also wise to go easy on the antibiotics. Al-
though they can be lifesavers for patients with
severe bacterial infections, there’s “a real risk
of harm” from overuse, says John Lynch, a doc-
tor at the University of Washington School of
Medicine. “Regaining your native microbiota
can be extremely hard to do,” he explains.
All this is not to say tots should be slobs.
You definitely want them washing their hands
regularly, and scrubbing high-touch surfaces is
imperative to avoid unpleasant infections like
norovirus, Rook and a colleague advised in a
recent paper. Just don’t go overboard and ster-
ilize everything. As it turns out, kids probably
do need a few germs to stay healthy.
ASK US ANYTHING ILLUSTRATION BY KATIE GORBACHEVA

STAT ATTACK THE IDEA THAT you swallow eight arachnids each night is a
load of malarkey popularized by a list of random “facts” that

DID I REALLY JUST went viral in the early days of the internet. Still, there is a rea-
son this stomach-churning urban legend persists: Humans
unknowingly gulp down all manner of disgusting detritus
EAT A SPIDER? each day, from random animal parts during lunch to their own
pearly whites while sleeping. You’re usually none the worse for
ingesting this stuff—as long as you don’t think too much about
how nasty it is. Here are some of the grossest, and strangest,
BY JAKE BITTLE things that go down your gullet without your knowing it.

1/ INSECTS 2/ RODENT FILTH

Countless arthropods swarm
your sustenance, leaving traces as
it moves from field to market. The
Food and Drug Administration
says everything from macaroni
to wine can contain dozens, even
hundreds, of bug bits before regu-
lators deem it contaminated.
Vermin scurrying around food-
processing sites introduce fur
and other, uh, leavings to myriad
products. The FDA allows one
rat hair for every 100 grams of
peanut butter, to offer just one ex-
ample. That means there could be
as many as four in a 16-ounce jar.

3/ MOLD 4/ DENTURES 5/ DIRT

It’s inevitable that some fruits,
veggies, and other goods sprout
fungus on their way from farm to
table. Depending upon the my-
celium and federal standard,
Uncle Sam lets around 3 percent
of canned peaches and 5 percent of
spices like cinnamon be moldy.
You’d think folks would notice
if they downed a tooth, but no:
Studies of people hospitalized for
accidental ingestions found that
dentures accounted for between
4 and 18 percent of unintentional
swallows, many of which occurred
while dozing off.
Young children will put almost
anything in their mouths. A se-
ries of stool-sample surveys in
the 1990s determined that the
average child digests as much
as 500 milligrams of soil—about
a thimbleful—daily. That works
out to a few ounces per year.
 ILLUSTRATION BY IGNAS KRAKYS
POSTCARD
HOW DO BLUNDERS
TURN TO WONDERS?
IT ALL STARTED with a broken beaker
BY ERIN BLAKEMORE
in St. Paul, Minnesota. 3M chemist Patsy
Sherman was working on a synthetic rub-
ber meant to endure the frigid temperatures
aircraft encounter at high altitude when her
assistant let the substance slip. The polymer
splashed all over the technician’s sneakers,
and nothing would remove it.
Intrigued, her boss suggested applying
the chemical to fabric. Sherman discovered
that H20 and solvents flowed right off any-
thing treated with the stuff, making it both
waterproof and stain-resistant. In 1956, af-
ter three more years of experimentation,
3M introduced Sherman’s discovery under
the brand name Scotchgard.
The genius of the unexpected lies in its
ability to spur researchers and inventors to
reconsider their work just enough to drive
innovation. Many of science and technol-
ogy’s most famous discoveries have been the
result of serendipitous strokes of luck. Micro-
biologist Alexander Fleming happened upon
penicillin in moldy petri dishes he’d neglected
POPSCI.COM / SPRING 2022
while on vacation. Engineer Percy Spencer
paused in front of a radar magnetron and re-
alized the candy bar in his pocket was melting,
leading to the creation of microwave ovens.
But today’s brilliant discoveries can also
become tomorrow’s blunders. In the case of
Scotchgard, the long chains of fluorine that
are a key part of its composition remain in
water and soil for decades. These per- and
polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) have
been found in the bodies of humans and
animals worldwide and linked to reduced
fertility, developmental delays, and hor-
monal disruptions. “They are pretty much
everywhere you look,” says Alissa Cordner,
a sociologist at Whitman College and co-
director of the PFAS Project Lab. 3M phased
the chemicals out in the 2000s.
Sherman’s fortunate mishap resulted in
one of her company’s best-known products.
Even if her work isn’t recognized for the rea-
sons she might have wanted, it shows that not
every solution is perfect, but a better one may
be just one slip-up away.
9
THREE MORE MISTAKES
THAT WORKED OUT
KEVLAR
In 1965, DuPont chemist Steph-
anie Kwolek botched a polymer
intended to make lighter tires. Her
mistake resulted in Kevlar, a fiber
five times stronger than steel. To-
day it is a key part of body armor,
drums, and even racing canoes.
THE IMPLANTABLE
PACEMAKER
Engineer Wilson Greatbatch set
out to build a heart monitor but in-
stalled the wrong resistor. Instead
of recording heartbeat-like elec-
tric impulses, his gadget generated
them. That led to the development
of the internal pacemaker in 1956.
SACCHARIN
In 1879, Russian chemist Constan-
tin Fahlberg noticed his food was
oddly sweet—and tracked the
taste to a coal tar byproduct on his
hands. That prompted the discov-
ery of saccharin, a substance that
is up to 700 times sweeter than
sugar yet has no calories.
ASK US ANYTHING ILLUSTRATION BY KATIE GORBACHEVA

THE BIG Q
OUR ENTIRE SOCIETY runs on garbage, at

COULD THE POWER GRID least in a manner of speaking. Eons-old

junk—coal and oil that began as ancient
plants and dinosaur remains, among other
RUN ON GARBAGE? dreck—has powered our electric grid
since the beginning of the industrial age.
Of the 3.8 trillion kilowatt hours of elec-
tricity the United States used in 2020,
most came from fossil fuels. The problem
is that this trash isn’t meant to keep lights
on or charge up EVs; it’s supposed to stay
deep beneath the surface, locking away the
gases that now flood our atmosphere and
BY SARA KILEY WATSON cause disastrous warming.

The good news—and bad news—is that
we’re making new batches of carbon-rich
refuse all the time. In 2018, the aver-
age American generated an unsavory
4.9 pounds of waste every day. Could
these fresh trash heaps help replace our
dependence on dead dinos?
We already know, of course, that we can
burn carbon-based products for energy.
But simply setting trash aflame has its
own nasty side effects. Incineration plants,
which have been running in the US since
1885, emit nitrogen oxides, sulfur dioxides,
particulate matter, lead, mercury, and di-
oxins, among other toxins. They also belch
greenhouse gases out the wazoo: more than
half of what coal spews. The process isn’t
even very efficient, extracting just a frac-
tion of the refuse’s potential power. “A lot of
energy escapes in the process,” says Johan
Enslin, executive director of the Energy
Systems Program at Clemson University.
Luckily, firing up trash, be it new or mil-
lions of years old, isn’t the only way to turn
it into fuel. Take natural gas: Deep beneath
the earth, organic matter breaks down and
compresses to form methane (chemically,
CH4). We call that byproduct natural gas,
which has run a chunk of the grid since the
1960s, and which today contributes more
power than coal and oil combined.
Our heaps of castoffs mean we’ve got that
same gas topside too. Deprived of oxygen in
landfills and manure ponds, modern waste
breaks down into methane more or less
the same way as the ancient subterranean
stuff. There’s plenty of incentive to trap that
gas: Methane is more than 25 times as po-
tent as carbon dioxide in terms of trapping
heat in the atmosphere, and municipal solid
waste landfills are the third-largest source
of human-related CH4 emissions in the US.
Enter biogas, a combination of the car-
bon dioxide and methane that naturally
creep up out of moldering garbage. Hu-
manity has tapped these landfill burps
in various forms since the late 1800s, and
today more than half of the EU’s biogas pro-
duction goes toward generating electricity.
There are a couple of different meth-
ods for turning that junk into voltage. The
oldest involves a vessel called an anaero-
bic digester: Organic matter goes into an
oxygen-deprived tank, where it breaks
down over the course of days or months.
The resulting gas is often used to power
internal combustion engines or turbines
that produce electricity and heat. Biogas
can also generate voltage through fuel cells,
which tap a chemical reaction to separate
hydrogen atoms into electrons and pro-
tons. The negatively charged particles then
run through a circuit, creating energy with
fewer emissions than combustion.
Right now, biogas producers fall into
three categories—biodigesters, landfill gas
recovery systems, and wastewater treat-
ment plants. Trash-heap-based projects
currently make up the primary source of
biogas production nationwide, bringing in
some 17 billion kilowatt hours—less than
OUR ENTIRE
SOCIETY
TECHNICALLY
RUNS ON
GARBAGE
ALREADY.
POPSCI.COM / SPRING 2022 11
half a percent of our annual usage.
Farms and wastewater treatment fa-
cilities could hold the key to boosting
American usage. At present, just 20 dairies
and livestock operations around the coun-
try turn their dung into power, which nets
only around 173 million kilowatt hours—
scarcely enough to keep the country alight
for 30 minutes. But the EPA estimates
there are more than 8,000 farms across
the US that could plausibly recover biogas.
That would rake in another 16 billion kilo-
watt hours of energy each year. And as of
2017, just 860 wastewater treatment plants
in the States used their gold mine of gar-
bage for biogas energy, leaving more than
15,000 other facilities to send similar sludge
off to dumps and incinerators instead.
Sure, closing that gap still wouldn’t give
us close to all the juice we need. But toasted
trash could fill in a missing piece of the re-
newable energy puzzle. On days when the sun
barely shines and the wind doesn’t blow, an-
imals—and humans—will continue to poop.
Unlocking that potential will largely
come down to making policy changes. The
rest of the world has already shown us how
it’s done. In 2009, the EU mandated that
20 percent of the bloc’s energy come from
renewables, and as early as the 1990s, coun-
tries like Germany were using incentives
to get greener power on the grid. So it’s
no surprise that in 2015, the EU produced
around half of the globe’s total biogas. With
the Biden administration’s new goals of
making the stateside power sector “carbon
pollution-free” by 2035, the US may have a
chance of catching up.
Even before White House mandates,
the number of renewable-natural-gas-to-
pipeline projects shot up from 219 to 312
between early 2019 and late 2020. Accord-
ing to the Environmental and Energy Study
Institute, renewable methane and biogas
sources could one day replace 10 percent of
the natural gas used in the United States.
So could we ever run the entire electrical
grid using nothing but garbage? Probably
not. And wind, solar, and hydro arguably
have the potential to power the whole thing
on their own. But tapping the planet’s junk
could help us make the most of methane
that would otherwise keep filling our atmo-
sphere. We just need to make sure we learn
from the mistakes we made powering all
our cars and factories on dinosaurs.
ASK US ANYTHING ILLUSTRATION BY IGNAS KRAKYS

NEWS YOU CAN USE

YOU HAVE B.O., but honestly, you’re not alone. This common problem starts with
AM I REALLY sweat, which is mainly an odorless mix of water and salt the body secretes to keep you
cool. On its own, perspiration is fine; the funk comes from a combo of proteins and lipids

THAT STINKY? released by apocrine glands in the armpits and groin. Bacteria and other organisms on
the skin love that oily soup and release the stench after slurping it up. The key to avoid-
ing malodorousness is simply a matter of breaking up their dinner party. Lucky for you,
there are many easy ways to stop the stink.
BY CHUCK SQUATRIGLIA

1
4

ADAPTED FROM POPSCI.COM; REPORTING BY CLAIRE MALDARELLI, HUGH NEILL, JESSICA BODDY, JOHN KENNEDY
6

1/ GET WET 2/ USE PROTECTION 3/ DRESS RIGHT

A shower each morning or after a
workout washes away hungry mi-
crobes and the smorgasbord of
sweat, dead skin cells, and other
detritus they devour. Antimi-
crobial soap can help. Don’t boil
yourself, though: 10 minutes under
warm water will do the job without
damaging skin’s protective lipid
layer and drying you out.
Deodorant can mask unpleas-
ant aromas, while antiperspirant
blocks pores to prevent moisture
from reaching the skin’s surface
in the first place. If you want a
more natural option, try mineral
salt stones. They repel the reek
by killing bacteria, eliminating
the threat of body odor before it
can even begin.
Once you’re fresh and clean,
don’t negate all that diligent
scrubbing by donning synthetic
fabrics like polyester. Such ap-
parel often retain the fats and oils
in sweat, so they can kick up your
stinkiness by smelling funky on
their own. Natural fibers like cot-
ton, linen, and wool can go longer
before becoming ripe.

4/ FRESHEN UP
If you find yourself getting pun-
gent during the day, a strategic
scrub with a cleansing wipe or
two will make fast work of the
problem. Follow up with a fresh
application of deodorant, anti-
perspirant, or a dab of cologne
or perfume. Changing your un-
dergarments can help if the
situation is truly dire.
5/ HOLD THE SEASONING
If you are especially prone to per-
spiring or worried about how
you smell, avoid pungent meals.
Onions, garlic, and spicy foods
contain fat-soluble compounds
that dissolve in the digestive sys-
tem and are released along with
your sweat. As they surface, they
can sometimes provide a dizzy-
ing whiff of last night’s supper.
5
6/ JUST RELAX
Tense situations can fire up
the apocrine glands, making
you sweat more—so it’s always
helpful to avoid stress. And re-
member, you probably aren’t as
stinky as you might think. That
sudden waft of foulness often
seems worse to you because your
nose has a front-row seat. Sadly,
there’s no solution for that.
 ILLUSTRATION BY KATIE GORBACHEVA
MASTER CLASS IT'S A TRUTH universally acknowledged
that if you shove wired headphones into your
WHAT DO pocket, they’ll eventually emerge in a jumble
of knots. That’s why mathematical biologist
Mariel Vazquez keeps a tangled pair at her
TANGLED desk: Looking at the messy cord helps her
envision how each microscopic human cell
CABLES
manages to pack in 6 feet of DNA.
Of course, the twisted strands within our
bodies carry much higher stakes than even the
HAVE TO most chaotic audio cable. Cells would die if they
couldn’t efficiently store these helixes in tight
quarters while still being able to access their
DO WITH genetic information. Figuring out how they
manage to do so is one of the knotty problems
Vazquez’s interdisciplinary lab is designed to
DNA? tackle, often with an eye toward practical appli-
cations like novel cancer treatments.
The lab’s work centers around a field of
mathematics called topology, which Vazquez
came to somewhat serendipitously in college.
She majored in math as an undergraduate
BY RYAN F. MANDELBAUM at the National Autonomous University of
POPSCI.COM / SPRING 2022 13
Mexico, but this left her little opportunity to
study living things, which she had been curi-
ous about since high school. She found a way
to fuse her interests when she took a class in
topology, a discipline that classifies shapes
based on their ability to transform. It consid-
ers a sphere, for instance, to be equivalent to
a cube, since you can mold one into the other.
Doughnuts are a different beast, however:
Turning an orb into a ring requires slicing a
hole in it or sticking its ends together, making
them two fundamentally different shapes.
Vazquez came to think of gene-packed cells
as a topological problem. After all, she explains,
“It all boils down to the fact that DNA is a very
long chain that fits into a very tiny environ-
ment.” That revelation turned into a Ph.D. and
a postdoc, and eventually a role as a professor
of mathematics, microbiology, and molecular
genetics at the University of California, Davis.
Over the past two decades, her work has
tapped topological concepts to make core dis-
coveries about how our bodies keep track of
DNA strands. For example, mathematicians can
calculate an “unknotting number” for a snarl of
wires—the minimum number of times strands
within the jumble have to uncross for the whole
mess to come untied. Vazquez’s work has shown
that a particular set of enzymes seem to know
the unknotting numbers inside cells; they tend
to access DNA exactly where necessary to undo
the complex crisscrosses efficiently, rather than
taking more complicated routes.
Her team’s advances could help biologists de-
velop a better understanding of how DNA winds
inside viruses, which could then reveal how dis-
eases spread. They might also lead to therapies
that target enzymes responsible for unwinding
genes within cancer cells, halting their growth.
But Vazquez is especially interested in the
fundamental nature of this research. By study-
ing how DNA fits into cells, mathematicians
develop a keener sense of shapes overall. Ad-
vances in labs like hers can have implications far
beyond our bodies—from uncovering new mate-
rials for electronics and computation to showing
why jumbled magnetic fields emit solar flares.
ASK US ANYTHING
SOUND BITES
CAN WE CLEAN
THE INTERNET?
THE WEB IS CLUTTERED with disinformation, plagued
by hackers, and littered with harmful content. That’s
when it’s working—and good luck figuring out what’s
wrong with your connection if it isn’t. It’s almost
enough to make you log off and read a book. While
it’s true that more moderation and oversight would
go a long way toward addressing the problem, tech-
nology could do more to clean the mess it’s made.
We asked four experts for their best advice on mak-
ing the online world a bit tidier and safer.
BY TARA SANTORA
ILLUSTRATION BY KATIE GORBACHEVA
To combat misinformation
about COVID-19 vaccines, po-
litical figures, and the like, the
government must continue
spending research money on
developing tools to identify
and flag it. Social networks
don’t go far enough to govern
users’ posts; they should put
forth more policies and apply
better algorithms—even if it
decreases revenue. The ed-
ucation system and parents
also should teach kids that
seeing is not believing.
—Wael AbdAlmageed,
computer scientist at the
University of Southern California
Information Sciences Institute
Instagram, TikTok, and Snap-
chat aren’t required to report
how many young children are
on their platforms, how much
time they’re spending there, and
what they’re gravitating toward.
If independent organizations
could learn from this data and
help platforms improve by, say,
steering children away from
content featuring self-harm or
suicidal ideation, our kids would
be healthier because of it.
—Titania Jordan,
chief marketing officer at
online safety company Bark
Technologies
When your Wi-Fi isn’t work-
ing or videos are constantly
buffering, it can be challenging
for internet users to figure out
what exactly is wrong. Often
there is more to the issue than
a faulty broadband connection.
People need to know they can
use online tools like download-
speed tests to diagnose
individual factors. That infor-
mation can then empower them
to advocate for better service
from their providers, so they’re
not just restarting their router.
—Luke Deryckx,
chief technology officer at
internet testing and analytics
company Ookla
When tech companies find
and fix software flaws during
updates, that information be-
comes publicly available.
Hackers can take advantage
of those errors in computers
and phones that haven’t been
patched, which is why these
corrections account for so
many attacks. One of the most
important things you can do
to keep your information safe
online is keep your operating
system and browser up to date.
—Chris Kanich,
computer scientist at the
University of Illinois at Chicago
 WHEN IT COMES TO
MAKING PLANS
YOU’RE THE BEST
MAKE A PLAN
TO PROTECT YOU AND
YOUR LOVED ONES FROM
A NATURAL DISASTER

Sign up
for local weather and
emergency alerts

Prepare
an emergency kit

Make
a family
communications plan

Get started at ready.gov/plan

 U
D T
S

I
N

T
E
H

I D
W
N

A team of scientists takes on the BY VIRGINIA GEWIN POPSCI.COM

big threats posed by tiny particles. PHOTOGRAPHS BY TRAVIS RATHBONE SPRING 2022 / PG 17
 A

PAIR OF EMPTY docks sit atop dried muck at an abandoned marina, glaring
reminders that the largest saltwater lake in the Western Hemisphere is disap-
pearing. Three main tributaries empty into Utah’s Great Salt Lake, but decades
of their flows being diverted for agriculture, cities, and industry—along with
prolonged drought—have starved the 1,700-square-mile body of its lifeblood.
Last summer the inland sea made national headlines when it dropped to the
lowest point ever recorded, exposing roughly 750 square miles of sediment to
the same winds that carve hoodoos and sculpt arches to the south and east.
Despite much-needed rain on this early-October afternoon, only the slim-
mest sheen of water glistens where the lake should be—and it will disappear
within days. The patches of bare earth it will leave behind can easily turn into
dust that blows straight into Utah’s largest urban area, Salt Lake City, about
30 miles to the east. Making matters worse, that sediment is full of arsenic.
Kevin Perry, an atmospheric scientist at the University of Utah in Salt
Lake City, has covered nearly every inch of this sandy terrain riding (some-
times pushing) a fat-tired bicycle to sample and identify the most erodible
patches. Between 2016 and 2018, he pedaled 2,300 miles—dodging lightning,
bullets from trigger-happy target shooters, and roaming bison on Antelope
Island, a state park that juts into the southeastern corner of the lake. And he
got caught in 15 or so of the increasingly frequent dust storms on the dried
lake bed, or playa. “My legs were sandblasted,” he says. “Visibility reduced
to feet in minutes. Sand was in my eyes.”
By documenting the amount of vegetative cover, the presence and thick-
ness of any biological crust produced by bacteria, algae, or mosses, and the
percentage of tiny dust-prone silt and clay particles, Perry determined that
9 percent of Great Salt Lake sediments readily blow away. But as much as
22 percent could—especially if human activities, such as the use of roving
all-terrain vehicles or motorcycles, destroy the crust. Perry, a meteorologist
by training, estimates Salt Lake City annually gets 10 to 15 notable dust events
that reduce visibility to less than a mile, up from none only 15 years ago. He
has to approximate because the sensors required to monitor air quality are
few in number, not well placed for his purposes, and set to measure only one

18 SPRING 2022 » POPSCI.COM

24-hour period every three days, to keep costs low. Even
if dust storms are happening all the time, you have only a
1-in-3 chance of being able to measure one, he says.
Perry is part of a team of six scientists aiming to track
dust, both the extent to which it moves in acute storms
and the incognito chronic creep of microscopic granules
called particulates that can make one year dustier than
the next—or alter the airborne earth’s long-term con-
tribution to climate change. Their project, called Dust
Squared, will over five years expand monitoring, assess
the particles’ effect on water quality, and develop molec-
ular “fingerprints” to better track, model, and ultimately
predict their movement. Not only do they want to know
where the stuff comes from, they want to understand
what travels in it—and, once it settles, what impact it
has on human health and ecosystem function. Efforts to
quantify the amount emitted from the Great Salt Lake
THERE’S NOT A LOT OF WORK ON THE IMPACTS OF DUST ON WATER
QUALITY. WE SEE IT ON THE SNOWPACK, BUT THE NEXT STEP IS SEEING WHERE
IT GOES, WHERE IT ENDS UP IN THE WATERSHED. IT GETS PRETTY MESSY.
could better inform land and water management pol-
icies. The project is just one example of the alliances
being built by US scientists to coordinate and prioritize
research efforts to investigate the rising dust threat.
Dust may be one of the biggest environmental hazards
routinely swept under the rug. A 2021 study led by en-
vironmental economists at Carnegie Mellon University
found that a 9.7 and 12.2 percent increase in dust in the US
West and Midwest, respectively, between 2016 and 2018
resulted in 9,700 additional premature deaths annually by
2018, translating to $89 billion in damages. While ongo-
ing drought and land and water management are factors,
other possible causes of the increase in airborne partic-
ulates range from greater wildfire activity to decreased
enforcement of the Clean Air Act. Particulate matter 10
microns in diameter is called PM10. Anything smaller
than that can damage lung tissue, cause lung cancer, and
increase risk of death. Valley fever, a fungal disease that
can infect the lungs once it gets kicked up by high winds,
is on the rise. Dust-caused traffic fatalities garner the
most attention, however. On a Sunday afternoon in late
July 2021, in southwestern Utah, poor visibility led to a
22-car pileup that killed eight and sent 10 to the hospi-
tal. “It was an extremely tragic event—we had never seen
20 SPRING 2022 » POPSCI.COM
that in Utah,” says Maura Hahnenberger, the Dust Squared team
member who studies how meteorology shapes dust movement
from the region to the Rocky Mountains.
Dry lake beds represent the West’s largest single dust source.
The Great Salt Lake is just the latest so-called terminal lake—a
water body that doesn’t empty into the ocean—to go parched.
The most infamous is California’s Owens Lake, whose primary
tributary was diverted in 1913 to supply Los Angeles with wa-
ter. By 1987, when the EPA first found the lake violated National
Ambient Air Quality Standards for particulate matter, it was the
largest PM10 source in the nation.
A study released by Brigham Young University in 2020 found
that Utahns may be losing roughly two years each on their life
expectancies due to poor air quality. Further, it costs the state
about $2 billion a year in healthcare expenses, missed work time,
lost tourism, and decreased growth.
Salt Lake City residents are concerned that potentially
—GREG CARLING, HYDROGEOLOGIST
toxic desiccated sediments will worsen their already worri-
some smog. The city sits in a bowl, known as the Great Basin,
that stretches from California to western Utah; the lake, to the
west, is its lowest point, and the Wasatch and Uinta mountain
ranges that tower over the urban center form its eastern bor-
der. In the winter, the peaks cause inversions whereby warm air
traps a polluted cold layer in the valley for extended periods. In
the summer, warm, stagnant air causes spikes of ozone, and,
increasingly, Utah gets California’s wildfire smoke. “Typically,
spring and fall were when we had really good air quality,” says
Perry, “but that’s when we get our big dust storms. They are
closing our good air quality window—and that puts us all at risk
for poor health outcomes over time.”
T 7,800 FEET, citron-colored aspen trees encircle
an 80-year-old weather station situated where the
A Wasatch and Uinta mountain ranges meet. Two Dust
Squared team members are installing high-elevation
collection devices before the first major storm of the season
dumps more than a foot of snow.
Jeff Munroe, a geologist at Middlebury College in Vermont
and principal investigator of the project, pours black mar-
bles into a simple, shallow plexiglass square with five separate
troughs. Dust will get trapped below the spheres, while their

dark surfaces will heat up and help evaporate any snow or rain
that falls into the troughs. The decidedly low-tech device will sit
undisturbed in the same location, accumulating particles until
his team samples them in warm weather to collect the “winter”
deposits and again in the fall to check the “summer” yield.
The Uintas are one of the few mountain ranges in the lower
48 with an unusual east-west orientation. As a result, Munroe
says, they offer scientists a “ready-made experiment” to study
how dust moves from the Great Basin to the Rocky Mountains.
“It’s this nice kind of catcher’s mitt for stuff coming from the
south or north,” adds colleague Greg Carling, a hydrogeologist
at Brigham Young University in Provo. With some 18 such de-
vices spread across the range, they can determine how much
falls and from which direction.
Munroe is wrapping up his 25th season in the Uinta
Mountains, where he first began studying how dust shapes
high-elevation ecosystems, and where he deployed the first col-
lection devices in the Wasatch in 2020. He and Carling began
collaborating in 2015. In 2019, the duo published a first attempt
at determining whether the playas or urban pollution is the pri-
mary dust source in the two ranges; they found that a startling
90 percent of the particles in the Wasatch came from the pla-
yas of the Great Salt Lake, roughly 75 miles east, and Sevier
Lake, around 150 miles southwest. But they couldn’t distin-
guish between the two sources. Carling says the next step is
to differentiate the playas, then consider additional sources,
such as other playas, agriculture, and oil and gas development.
Jumping at the opportunity to study dust “from source to sink,”
Munroe and five Utah-based colleagues pulled together to form
the Dust Squared crew after landing a $5 million grant from
the National Science Foundation in 2020.
One of the big questions the team aims to tackle is what, if any,
impact the minerals, metals, and microbes that hitchhike on dust
THORN MERRILL
can have on distant ecosystems. For example, Janice Brahney, a
biogeochemist at Utah State University, looks at how phosphorous-
laden dust alters pH and plankton growth in alpine lakes.
Carling, meanwhile, studies whether the metals carried along
degrade water quality when snow flushes into mountain streams.
DUST IN THE WIND
Kevin Perry hauls
a device called
a PI-SWERL—a
miniature wind
tunnel—across
the dried bed of the
Great Salt Lake.
“During snowmelt we see this increase in metal concen-
trations in the river,” he says. Using samples from the
headwaters of the Provo River, near the weather sta-
tion, Carling has detected lead, copper, beryllium, and
aluminum—none of which could have come from local
rock’s parent material, a simple quartzite. “Lead shouldn’t
be in these samples,” he says. “It must have come from an-
other source.” That finding turned attention to what the
wind blows in. “There’s not a lot of work on the impacts
of dust on water quality. We see it on the snowpack, but
the next step is seeing where it goes, where it ends up in
the watershed. It gets pretty messy.” To make those con-
nections, Carling compares what’s in dust to what’s in the
samples from the Provo, a source of drinking water.
Similarly, McKenzie Skiles, a snow hydrologist at the
University of Utah, has been modeling dust impacts on
snowmelt in the mountains to try to get a fix on how that
affects the region’s water supply and quality. Eighty to
90 percent of Salt Lake City’s water comes from snow,
Skiles says, “yet current snowmelt models do not ac-
count for dust impacts.” Her research suggests the
airborne soil causes the white stuff to liquefy between
one and three weeks sooner than it would otherwise. In-
stead of a steady trickle of water through spring, this
earlier thaw leaves less to flow into rivers and ground-
water during increasingly hot, dry summers. In the
worst-case scenario, melting causes inundation that the
soil—and reservoirs—can’t absorb and store. “It’s the
mountains that provide all of our water,” she says.
The team’s real goal, though, is to inform policies that
manage the amount of dust getting into the snowpack in
the first place, which is why Carling looks for chemical
fingerprints to connect what lands in the peaks to dried-
out lake beds. In 2020, he showed that, although it’s slight,
there is enough difference in their strontium isotopes to
distinguish dust from the Great Salt Lake and sediments
from the all-but-disappeared Sevier Lake. “That’s one fin-
gerprint, but it would be better to have others,” he says.
21
Carling and colleagues are also exploring whether they can
find enough unique microbial DNA to distinguish whether
their samples link back to sediment, soil, or mining.
Without fingerprinting, existing monitoring methods
can miss a lot. Researchers can trace a bigger dust event
back to the source, but it requires luck: A satellite must
be in the right place at the right time to capture defini-
tive images. When those images don’t exist, Skiles turns
to a technique called “back-trajectory modeling,” which
uses meteorological data to trace a parcel of air backward
over time to see where it picked up particles. Using atmo-
spheric computer models that determine the origins of
air masses, Skiles tracked dust in the Wasatch Mountains
to a single event in 2017 originating from the Great Salt
Lake and desert. The model showed that event contrib-
uted roughly half of the snow’s total dust deposit.
22 SPRING 2022 » POPSCI.COM
Alternatively, the Dust Squared team can try to piece together
information on events using EPA sensors, but those are limited
too—down to only 19 such probes in Utah, 14 of which monitor
PM2.5, the size that can most easily penetrate the lungs, and five
of which track PM10. Their project will add another 550 low-cost
sensors, most of them in urban areas, including PurpleAir mon-
itors used by a popular real-time air quality smartphone app, to
detect particulates below PM2.5. (About 80 percent of the state’s
population lives in the urban-industrial corridor known as the
Wasatch Front, extending from Brigham City to Provo and in-
cluding Salt Lake City.) They also plan to install a dozen in more
rural areas. In recent years, the EPA has gotten rid of PM10 sen-
sors, since PM2.5 poses the greatest public-health concerns, but
PM10 remains problematic, and without the ability to monitor it,
the researchers can’t maintain a long-term record. “For dust re-
search, it’s difficult not to have,” says Hahnenberger.

A T FIRST GLANCE, Owens Lake, 200 miles north of
Los Angeles, east of the Sierra Nevada, looks like
a crusty, pillaged landscape. An expanse of saline
crystals covers most of the area, while streaks of
crimson, salt-loving bacteria thrive in briny shallow pools. For
decades, the dust generated here was hazardous to the area’s
40,000 permanent residents—and millions of visitors to the
area’s national parks. By 2014, a court order required imple-
menting dust-control measures to mitigate 44.2 percent of the
110-square-mile playa, the largest such project in the nation.
The EPA’s maximum National Ambient Air Quality Standard
for coarse particulate matter is 150 micrograms per cubic me-
ter of air during a 24-hour period, and amounts above 350 cause
significant harm to human health. “At Owens Lake, we have
had exceedances greater than 100 times the maximum stan-
dard,” says Phillip Kiddoo, the air pollution control officer now
DUST IN THE WIND
overseeing mitigation efforts on behalf of the state’s
Great Basin Unified Air Pollution Control District. “Our
highest day was around 20,000 micrograms.”
It’s taken three decades of experimentation with blan-
kets of gravel, vegetative plantings, and shallow flooding to
wrangle the dust. In the 1990s and early 2000s, the six lake
sites monitored had dozens of exceedances each year; in
2020, the area topped federal limits on only eight occasions.
It’s a mitigation success story, albeit one with a $2.5 billion
price tag, and one that without a doubt will require ongoing
maintenance. “We’ve learned that working with nature is
much smarter than against nature,” says Kiddoo.
To avoid this kind of costly saga, Dust Squared’s Perry
thinks it makes the most sense to keep the Great Salt Lake
alive. In June 2021, during a brutal drought, water from the
Bear River—the lake’s most significant source—stopped
flowing into it, even as state legislators entertained pro-
posals to divert more of its water for other purposes. Until
the Great Salt Lake began to disappear, many locals con-
sidered it a nuisance. “The public thinks it’s salt water and
can’t be used for anything, and that every drop of water
that makes it in the lake is wasted,” says Perry.
But a 2012 state report said different. The inland sea
generates $1.3 billion annually to Utah’s economy, includ-
ing $1.1 billion from industry (largely mineral extraction),
$136 million in recreation, and $57 million to raise brine
shrimp for aquaculture feed. The state’s $1 billion ski in-
dustry also benefits from lake-effect snow. And the area
is also a prominent pathway for migratory birds. One con-
sequence of its disappearance, though, has even greater
power to galvanize public attention: “The thing that
unites everyone is air quality,” says Perry.
Because of smog levels during winter inversions, the
state fell out of compliance with National Ambient Air
Quality Standards nearly a decade ago, forcing it to create
a pollution mitigation strategy. But the plan doesn’t take
into account dust coming off the Great Salt Lake. Now, with
growing public outcry to save the lake, politicians have taken
steps to find solutions. Utah congressional representative
Blake Moore teamed up with a California congressman to
introduce the Saline Lake Ecosystems in the Great Basin
States Program Act in September of 2021. If passed, the
legislation would direct the US Geological Survey to study
how best to manage terminal water systems in the region—
knowledge that could also benefit Lake Albert in Oregon
and the Salton Sea and Mono Lake in California.
Perry’s previous research has shown that the most
cost-effective way to prevent dust is to stop diverting
freshwater, most notably to agriculture, and replenish
flows into the Great Salt Lake. “Ten feet of water, and
you could solve the dust problem,” he says.
The MIT Knight Science Journalism Fellowship Program
funded travel for this story.
23

EARTH’S ORBIT IS PACKED WITH HUMAN
GARBAGE. CAN THESE SIX INNOVATIONS HELP
MAKE IT A LITTLE MORE, WELL, SPACIOUS?
BY:BY TATYANA WOODALL
ILLUSTRATIONS BY TIM MCDONAGH
POPSCI.COM
SPRING 2022
PG 25
IN NOVEMBER OF 2021, the crew of the In-
ternational Space Station briefly went on
lockdown after they were pummeled by shards
of metal from a retired satellite blown up during
an unannounced Russian military exercise. Ac-
cording to NASA, the Department of Defense
currently tracks more than 27,000 pieces of
similar orbital debris, aka space junk. But many
other bits of trash are too small to keep tabs on.
Hurtling at speeds of 17,500 miles per hour—
and without the friction of an atmosphere to
burn them up—even minuscule flecks of rocket
paint can spell doom for an astronaut or flying
craft. And while accidents have been rare, the
rise of commercial space traffic (54 launches in
2021 alone, compared to the previous record of
33 in 2018) has exponentially increased the risk
of these potential collisions.
“The amount of material is stacking up,” says
Mariel Borowitz, an associate professor at Geor-
gia Tech who specializes in international space
policy and security. But decluttering the final
frontier is easier said than done. Besides cost,
Borowitz says, the question of who can do the
cleaning remains murky. If NASA puts a satellite
into orbit, she explains, “it belongs to the United
States even if it breaks into pieces.” The same
holds true for any company or government. If
you wanted to tidy up someone else’s junk, she
says, you still wouldn’t have the right to do it.
Fortunately, many countries and companies
are handling that quagmire by testing ways to
deal with the trash, whether it’s a Japanese sat-
ellite that sets magnetic traps or a four-armed
plasma bot named Fred. Here are six of human-
ity’s most promising projects for monitoring
and clearing out the heavens.
 WEIGHING IN AT about 220 pounds,
RemoveDebris
this target-savvy satellite com-
bines a harpoon that shoots out
at 65 feet per second with a net
that’s 16 feet wide to trap space
junk and pull it back to Earth’s
atmosphere. Two cameras record
ORIGIN: UK the process so that officials on
the ground can assess the waste’s
COST: $18 MILLION
trajectory as it falls.
DEPLOYED: 2018 But don’t let the name throw
you off: RemoveDebris isn’t remov-
M.O.: HARPOON HUNTER ing debris quite yet. Launched in
26 SPRING 2022 / POPSCI.COM
2018, the system is currently being
tested outside the International
Space Station. It practices catch-
ing experimental targets (like
small satellites called CubeSats)
using a detection system with
lidar and 3D vision tech similar to
that of self-driving cars. But even
though it’s not quite ready, it al-
ready has multiple collaborators
(including SpaceX and Airbus) and
is one of our brightest hopes for
pulling refuse out of thin air.
 A MESS OF COSMIC PROPORTIONS

ORIGIN: US

Solar CubeSat COST: $875,000

DEPLOYED: 2025 (EST.)

M.O.: SOLAR SURFER

WHEN IT COMES to long-term solu- Unlike many other would-be clean-

tions, it’s sometimes best to think
small. CubeSats, 4-inch-wide
nanosatellites, have been used
to conduct space research since
2003. Now student engineers from
Embry-Riddle Aeronautical Univer-
sity in Florida have modeled one
specifically to take out the trash.
The Solar CubeSat prototype
ers, this wee satellite won’t run
out of fuel and become more junk:
It packs a deployable sail that
catches the power of the sun’s rays,
which means it can keep breezing
through low Earth orbit for as long
as its hardware holds up.
According to the Embry-Riddle
team, the prototype is designed to

SPMN uses a compact robotic arm to

reach out and capture free-floating
objects up to about 4 inches away.
use off-the-shelf technologies and
could yield a fully functional model
in four to five years.

ORIGIN: SPAIN
COST: $22,350/YEAR

DEPLOYED: 1996
M.O.: THE SPY NETWORK

FIREBALL NETWORKS, which consist of

strategically placed cameras rigged
to follow meteorites through the
skies, exist all over the world, from
the Czech Republic to Australia. The
Spanish Meteor and Fireball Net-
work (SPMN) was originally founded
in the 1990s to study cosmic rocks
with the rest of them. But in 2021, it
detected something new: pieces of
an incoming SpaceX rocket burn-
ing up over the coast. That further
proved that the tool could be used to
track the paths of organic and artifi-
cial matter as they approach land.
Currently made up of 34 ground
stations and 150 high-resolution
cameras positioned around the
Iberian countryside, SPMN can
alert local authorities to reentries
or meteorite falls. More widely, the
project aims to help people under-
stand the rare yet present terrestrial
dangers that come from increased
space activity over the years.
HOW HAS SPACE JUNK A look back on the mishaps
that turned low Earth orbit into BY
FILLED UP OUR SKY? a constellation of scraps. MAGGIE GALLOWAY

IMPACT One collision between two satellites can put thousands of pieces of junk into the at-
RADIUS mosphere. For example, in 2009, the 2,000-pound Russian Cosmos 2251 rammed into
the 1,200-pound Iridium 33 485 miles above Siberia, sending 2,371 pieces of identifi-
able debris careening around Earth. Space operations modelers like T.S. Kelso, founder
of CelesTrak, continue to track ruins and orbiting craft to prevent future disasters.

IRIDIUM 33

COSMOS 2251

VISUAL REFERENCES: T.S. KELSO/CELESTRAK; DATA SOURCE FOR STATISTICS AS OF 1/5/22: EUROPEAN SPACE AGENCY
COLLISION 10 MINUTES POST-COLLISION

At 11:56 a.m. (EST) on February 10, the unmaneu- It took these satellites roughly 100 minutes to
verable Cosmos 2251 hit Iridium 33. It was the circle Earth. Moments after the impact, their
first accident between two vessels in orbit. debris was already in motion.

180 MINUTES POST-COLLISION 197 DAYS POST-COLLISION

The fragments permeated different levels of the More than six months later, the wreckage had
atmosphere. Some bounced to higher, slower surrounded the planet. Today, close to 1,400 of
orbits, others to lower, faster ones. the pieces remain in orbit.

331 MILLION+ 630+ 2,840

bits of rubbish projected to be floating explosions and other fragmenta- inoperative satellites cluttering
above the atmosphere tion events since 1957 the planet’s orbit

UNLIKE THE OTHER high-flying
ELSA-d machines on this list, End-of-Life
Services by Astroscale (ELSA-d)
won’t be cleaning up garbage
that’s already in orbit. Instead,
its makers are banking on future
satellite engineers to incorporate
magnetic docking plates into their
ORIGIN: JAPAN
designs—and pay for ELSA-d’s
COST: UP TO $191 MILLION assistance when the time comes.
DEPLOYED: 2021 This angel of death takes the
form of a 385-pound winged
M.O.: MEGAMAGNETS “Chaser,” which relies on optical
A MESS OF COSMIC PROPORTIONS
sensing instruments and a set
of small magnets to seek, catch,
and relocate its targets. In a
2021 demo more than 300 miles
up in the air, ELSA-d successfully
caught and released a mini sat-
ellite with the custom hardware.
The next round of tests will have
it nab a compatible object while
tumbling, scan the environment
for litter on the lam, and pull
hunks of metal down into Earth’s
atmosphere to slowly decay.
POPSCI.COM / SPRING 2022 29
 Orbot Fred

ORIGIN: US
COST: NOT PUBLIC
DEPLOYED: 2025 (EST.)
M.O.: CLAW MACHINE
TECH STARTUP Rogue Space
Systems is tinkering with a 56-foot-
wide plasma-powered vehicle
whimsically dubbed Orbot Fred.
With two winglike solar panels,
it’s built for precision: Four robotic
arms will grasp and move a maxi-
mum of 700 pounds of garbage
away from other satellites’ or-
bits, then send the haul to burn in
Earth’s upper altitudes.
The company hopes to lever-
age private and public money to
get its fleet of Orbots online in
the next three years. One of its
sources could be SpaceWERX, the
innovation arm of the US Space
Force, which is looking to out-
source some answers to floating
junk, in-flight servicing and as-
sembly, and more. In 2021, the
department launched a grant pro-
gram called Orbital Prime that will
eventually award contracts of $1.5
million to selected competitors,
like Fred’s creators.

30 SPRING 2022 / POPSCI.COM


USING ION PROPULSION thrusters
Sweeper
to destabilize dead satellites and
push them out of other projectiles’
paths, the Sweeper, like many other
orbiting-trash-removal concepts,
aims to force debris down into our
atmosphere for a fiery finale.
Sweeper is actually one of the
ORIGIN: RUSSIA
oldest proposed missions meant
COST: $2 BILLION to help keep space collision-free,
with the original plans dating back
DEPLOYED: 2023 (EST.)
to 2010. Its creator, the Russian
M.O.: STUN GUN rocket company Energia, hasn’t
A MESS OF COSMIC PROPORTIONS
shared any updates on the project,
so there are still question marks
on all the details. Energia plans
to assemble and test the vehicle
by 2023. The pod, which might run
on nuclear power, will have the
capacity to collect and destroy
at least 600 defunct transmitters
over a 15-year life span. It’s unclear
whether it would eventually turn
into orbiting junk itself—or whether
another Sweeper would need to
bring it back to Earth.
 POPSCI.COM / SPRING 2022

33

THE UNLIKELY STORY OF A KITCHEN SCRUBBER AND

THE MARINE BIOLOGISTS WHO CAN’T LIVE WITHOUT IT
By RYAN BRADLEY | Photographs by TROPICO PHOTO
34 POPSCI.COM / SPRING 2022

ONE DAY IN THE LATE 1980s, Bruce Menge was wan-
dering the aisles of a grocery store, thinking over
a particular problem he was having with plankton.
A professor of marine biology at Oregon State Uni-
versity, Menge is a specialist in what’s known as a
meta-ecosystem, the place where two discrete ecol-
ogies collide. In his case, the spot where the land
meets the sea. Menge’s problem was that the billions
of tiny mussel and barnacle larvae—collectively
called plankton—carried from the deeper waters
toward the shoreline had to eventually land on some-
thing so he could gather and study them. But what
could that something be?
Barnacles and mussels filter water and shape the
shore, and their numbers can reveal the health of the
whole coast. The best way to calculate these shifts,
Menge found, was to sample the populations a few
times a year, just as their larvae began settling.
With barnacles, collecting the samples had been
pretty easy: He and his lab had found that the anti-
slick surface used on boat decking worked well.
Mussels, however, were proving much trickier. Their
larvae settle on the tufted strands of green algae and
TUFF LUCK
the byssal threads of adult mussels—heavily
varied surfaces, and difficult to emulate.
He needed something that acted like these
natural landing strips but was decidedly
unnatural in its uniformity.
That’s when he saw it, right in the
cleaning aisle: a reddish, orangish, plastic-
fiber-filamented ball designed for scrubbing
pots and pans, but potentially perfect for his
plankton problem. Eureka! The Tuffy.
“I thought, Whoa, that might do,” Menge re-
calls. He bought several, took them to his lab,
fitted them with lag screws and washers, and
anchored them to rocks at a few study sites
along the Oregon coast, not far from his bar-
nacle plates with the anti-slick boat decking.
Menge returned every few weeks, and after
three months, sure enough, little mussels had
started attaching to the Tuffys’ fibers.
Within a few years, Menge and his lab
were ordering Tuffys by the dozens, then the
hundreds. Word had spread. The sponge was
quickly becoming the mussel recruitment me-
dium for marine biologists around the globe.
It worked with species in Connecticut and Chile, in
South Africa and New Zealand, and along the coasts
of both the US and Australia. Best of all, it was afford-
able, easy to find, and standardized.
A few decades passed without incident. But there
was just one looming catch: The Tuffy wasn’t made
for marine scientists. It was a tool for scrubbing
kitchenware—a highly competitive slice of the con-
sumer product market. In the early 2010s, despite its
rabid fan base in the world of plankton research, the
Tuffy was unceremoniously discontinued.
The reasons were boringly corporate. “Although
a great number of consumers enjoyed it, the con-
sumer demand was not substantial enough to
warrant our continuing to market the S.O.S. Tuffy,”
is the official line. Tuffy was manufactured by S.O.S.
(for “Save Our Saucepans”), which in 1994 was pur-
chased by the Clorox Company. The firm quietly
phased out the product while introducing another
product called the S.O.S. Non-Scratch Scrubber.
While the new tool is sometimes, confusingly, mar-
keted under the name Tuffy, marine scientists, cast
iron collectors, and Amazon reviewers alike agree
it’s inferior to the original. Once word got out that
the Tuffy was going the way of the dodo, research-
ers scrambled, buying up boxes for many times
their grocery-store prices on eBay and scouring the
market for possible replacements.
Within the world of marine scientists studying
shoreline ecosystems, the Tuffy discontinuation was
a tsunami. But to the Clorox Company, it was but an
36 POPSCI.COM / SPRING 2022
indistinguishable ripple in the sea of consumer desire.
Some thought the sponge could have stood to im-
prove at what it was designed to do. Menge certainly
thought so. “The thing about a Tuffy,” he says, “is it’s
actually a pretty terrible scrubbing pad. But they are
great for recruiting mussels.” The fibrous balls had
become the standard, and because they were the
standard, the mussel studies depended on them.
There is an economic and organizational theory
that helps explain what happened with the Tuffy
scramble: It’s called path dependence, and the name
pretty much describes it perfectly. Once a certain
route is forged, a certain standard set, it’s incredibly
difficult to abandon. Subscribers to path dependence
(and that includes everyone from C-suite business
types to evolutionary economists) are fond of the say-
ing History matters—meaning that everything from
the particular widths of rail gauges to VHS outlasting
Betamax after the videocassette wars of the 1980s de-
pends on certain quirks of the past.
Bruce Menge stumbled upon a pot scrubber in a
grocery store aisle, and before long, studies of coastline
ecosystem health became dependent on the Tuffy. But
suddenly, a rare, even historic event: The Tuffy was
gone, and the path diverged.
SCIENTISTS REPURPOSE off-the-shelf products all
the time: tea strainers for sifting bones, toothbrushes
for scrubbing samples, yoga mats as a surface for
performing fish surgery, nail polish for tracking and
eradicating a botfly infestation. Jennifer Caselle, a re-
search biologist at the University of California, Santa
Barbara’s Marine Science Institute, is something of
an expert in such repurposing. Victoria’s Secret’s Am-
ber Romance scent, she pointed out in a presentation
on the topic a few years ago, is known among field bi-
ologists as one of the best bug repellents available. A
spill-proof paper from Xerox worked particularly well
for logging data underwater. When the manufacturer
changed the formula to one that no longer worked be-
neath the waves, “There was a whole period of a year
or two where marine science almost got shut down.”
She’s kidding, but she then adds, more gravely, “Xerox
doesn’t even know. That’s why the repurposing is
dangerous, because you could lose it, and they”—the
companies behind the products—“are not really go-
ing to care.” Caselle knows this firsthand, as she relies
on Tuffys for mussel recruitment in her own studies.
While it can be hard on consumers to lose some-
thing they’ve used and grown accustomed to—there
are entire message board discussions dedicated to
the discontinued Tuffy—they don’t quite come to
depend on it the way researchers do. There’s a differ-
ence between a tool for pot scrubbing and a scientific
standard; for the latter, even the closest analog could
introduce a variable that could skew the data.
Some classic examples of path dependency have
decidedly lower stakes. The QWERTY keyboard
continues to reign supreme even in the face of other,
better, more efficient layouts. But long ago, we picked
QWERTY as our standard, so QWERTY is what
we’re stuck with. How we became stuck with the con-
figuration is a matter of debate; some historians point
to a national typing-speed competition in the late
1880s in which the winning contestant had secretly
WITTHIN THEE WORL LD
OF MARIN NE SC
CIENTTISTS
S
STUDDYINGG SHOORELLINE
ECO
OSYSTE EMS, THE TUFFYY
DISC
CONTINUA ATION
N
WAS S A TS
SUN
NAMI.
memorized the QWERTY key positions, because—as
the story goes—the layout made absolutely no sense.
A lot of modern life is like this: Collisions of happen-
stance set us on paths we stick to for far longer than
seems logical. Consider the automobile—the kind that
requires us to pull fossilized plankton up out of the
earth and set it on fire to make it go. In their early days,
steam- and electric-powered cars were just as popular
as those that used internal combustion, if not more so.
But prospectors kept discovering oil in great quanti-
ties; it was cheap to transport and delivered a huge
amount of energy very quickly and easily. It won out.
Knowing that the paths we forge, the standards we set,
are the stuff not of brutal logic but of historic coinci-
dence can make you throw up your hands and curse
the Fates. Or, if you’re a scientist, it might make you roll
up your sleeves and go about finding a way forward.

Caselle and her lab cope by reusing their old Tuffys,
which isn’t nearly as simple as one might imagine.
First, grad students unravel each sponge, decon-
structing it from its balled-up form into something
quite long and cylindrical, like a fishnet stocking.
Then they carefully lay the sock out and scrub off its
detritus, which includes the larvae of mussels and
clams and various other tiny sea creatures, letting it
all collect in a sorting tray for later inspection under
a microscope. The biologists then rinse the Tuffys
and drape them along the edges of a gigantic card-
board box. Next to that container is another, identical
one containing reassembled, ready-to-use Tuffys,
balled back up and bundled into pairs with cable ties.
These reconstituted fibrous poufs will eventually be
attached to a mooring line and thrown out into the
Pacific, hundreds of yards off the coast.
Below the sorting station sits a box filled with
wooden deck brushes, used for recruiting urchin
larvae. Out on research boats, Caselle also relies on
SMURFs—Standardized Monitoring Units for Re-
cruitment of Fishes—made from garden and snow
fencing that mimics the kelp canopy, where many
baby fish and some small crabs make their homes.
Caselle’s lab, like most, employs items anyone can
buy, repurposed for science in the hope that compa-
nies won’t yank them off the market.
When she first learned about the Great Tuffy Vanish-
ing, Caselle was of course worried, but not too worried.
Sure, she called around, looking into finding a replace-
ment. But her lab already had a solution. She’d always
felt terrible about having to throw the scrubbers out
(“Here we are, marine scientists, throwing away all this
plastic for our research!”) and so had instituted the un-
spooling, drying, and re-bundling routine.
Still, she knew her cache couldn’t last forever, and
she could rarely find any online anymore. (Even the
replacements Clorox markets fetch $35 a pair from
devoted pot scrubbers on eBay.) She thought about
trying other sponges, just to see if they might work,
but she had second thoughts after she realized that de-
viating from the Tuffy might compromise the integrity
of her dataset. At one point 3M sent a crate of Dobie
scrubbers for use in a different experiment. These,
too, were in all ways inferior to the Tuffy. Too tight a
weave. Not as flexible. Generally just wrong. “Oh my
God, do you want them? We hate them,” she says.
TUFF LUCK
NOW TUFFYLESS, MENGE—whom Caselle calls
“Grandpa Tuffy”—has lately been giving renewed at-
tention to his historic data, trying to see what oceanic
and climactic secrets the shoreline plankton popula-
tions may have been holding on to. Specifically, he’s
been looking at how recruitment of mussels and bar-
nacles varies during and after marine heat waves.
Such spikes in ocean temps trigger extreme weather
events and species die-offs, among other ill effects.
These heat waves “are definitely going to be a thing
of the future, more frequent, more intense, and pose
a really major threat to coastal ecosystems,” he
says. In June 2021, a record-smashing scorcher hit
the Pacific Northwest, and temperatures along the
coastline topped 120 degrees Fahrenheit, killing an
estimated billion creatures along the seashore. The
collapse of mussel beds in some areas was nearly to-
tal, which would almost certainly indicate a broader
collapse of the ecosystem at large.
The mussels were telling us what was coming. One
retrospective study of data from 2011 and 2012 pub-
lished in the journal PLOS One in 2020 explored how
their calcareous shells register the increased acidifica-
tion of the sea, a result of rising CO2 in the atmosphere.
Another looked at how patterns in mussel populations
offer insight into shifts in the tides and new patterns of
upwelling. Such studies all used the Tuffy as a recruit-
ment tool for larvae, tapping the plankton themselves
as ecosystem bellwethers: anchored in place, long-
lived, collecting what comes from the current.
If a mussel were capable of knowing anything, it
might know its own history, seeing as it lives upon
it: New ones often settle atop old in a kind of mol-
lusk palimpsest, and some individuals can live for 50
years. But even if the bivalves knew of these shifts,
what could they do about the changing waters?
Where would they go? A mussel’s path, once it is
anchored, can’t be altered. Ours can. But only if
we work at it, only if we bother paying attention to
the signs and signals of our increasingly imperiled
world. Sometimes those signals are coming from the
unexpected and overlooked.
The lesson of the Tuffy isn’t that the whims
of corporate America can dismantle decades of
science—after all, the researchers have adjusted to
the new reality and kept on, reexamining old data,
reusing old Tuffys. The lesson is in the mussels them-
selves and all that they can teach us, all that they
have been warning us of. For years, Menge recalls,
his peers considered data about changes in mussel
population incidental, a mere afterthought. “We
didn’t think about why this change [in mussel popula-
tions] was happening, what factors were underlying
it,” he said. The prevailing thought was that “it prob-
ably wasn’t that important. Well, it turns out, it was.”
38 POPSCI.COM SPRING 2022
10 OF THE SLIMIEST, STICKIEST,
STINKIEST, SQUICKIEST, AND MOST
ESSENTIAL JOBS IN THE FIELD.
BY LEIGH COWART
ILLUSTRATIONS BY ISRAEL VARGAS
THERE’S SOMETHING DEEPLY respectable
about messy work. Someone who slams their
coffee and starts their day with decomposition
lives a hero’s journey. One second our intrepid
adventurer is eating a granola bar in the car,
and the next they are face-to-face with some-
thing so gnarly that they can’t talk about work
over dinner. But without them, the world would
be a more dangerous—and more disgusting—
place for the rest of us. Diving through feces to
retrieve corpses, scooping armfuls of fish slime,
and cooking human organs into sanitized mush
subjects stomachs, noses, and souls to a full-on
sensory onslaught. To those who take on some of
the filthiest jobs in science: We salute you.
 SCIENCE’S DIRTIEST JOBS

MOSQUITO FEEDER WHEN IT COMES to killing people, nothing outdoes

the mosquito. In 2020 these disease-wielding insects
took out an estimated 627,000 of us with malaria alone,
BLOODY
outpacing the rate at which humans kill each other.
Entomologists hope to lower that body count by curbing
the bugs’ ability to transmit deadly pathogens, but that
scholarship requires blood to keep a brood alive.
CREEPY While some labs wean the insects onto convenient
diets like rodents, they’re always keener to feed on
their natural supply—human hemoglobin, straight
from the source. That’s why some experts eager to
mimic real-world conditions offer up their own limbs.
They willingly submit their arms to a cloud of hungry
bloodsuckers, who sup upon the iron-rich essence of
life. During feeding, raised welts can become so nu-
merous that they fuse into one swollen expanse of
histamine reaction. Fierce itch aside, at least it’s not a
huge loss: Feeding a crew of 5,000 skeeters requires
about half an ounce of blood (you give the Red Cross
32 times as much in one go).
40 POPSCI.COM SPRING 2022

BENEATH OUR FEET lurks a terrible ocean of liquid

rock that occasionally spurts to the surface in a de-
structive splatter. Volcanologists tell us why, how, and
RISKY when this molten earth vomit will emerge so we don’t
get caught unawares. Even for those who choose this
MOIST path, it stinks. Volcanic gas is full of hydrogen sulfide,
which smells like rotten eggs. The foul compound can
reach dangerous levels on these moving mountain-
sides, requiring researchers to mask up in the grime.
ELI The Occupational Safety and Health Administra-
N
GRU

tion sets the permissible exposure limit for H2 S at 20

G

parts per million, which is up to 2,000 times our nose’s

olfactory threshold for picking up the stanky substance.
Studying volcanoes means asking questions like
STINKY How much ash raining down on me is too much? and Is the
amount of pumice falling out of the sky going to be a prob-
lem this afternoon? Observing an eruption means a work
environment filled with liquid rock up to 2200°F, which
pits scientists against obstacles like sweat-dampened
VOLCANOLOGIST clothes and continuously grimy equipment.

ARTIFICIAL INSEMINATION TECHNICIAN
FIELDS FROM BIOTECH research to
conservation rely on our ability to breed
animals more or less on demand. This
requires techs who know how and when
to squirt semen into a uterus to best
make a baby—and an understanding
of anatomy, physiology, and animal
behavior. Also: a willingness to come
face-to-face with a fair bit of poop.
Before inseminating a horse, for in-
stance, one must stick one’s arm up the
rectum and use fingers and an ultra-
sound probe to check the ripeness of the
ovarian follicles. If they’re ready, a clean
hand goes inside the mare’s vagina with
SCIENCE’S DIRTIEST JOBS
a semen-filled pipette to reach the cer- MOIST STINKY
vix, which feels like a small, puckered
mouth. For larger animals, like ele-
phants, even going armpit-deep won’t
get you where you need to go: The
semen—collected with the help of man-
EY
ual rectal stimulation—is delivered via
a long, flexible endoscope. High-level in- FECAL
O
G O
seminators get certified by programs
that meet the standards of the National
Association of Animal Breeders, which
can help them stand out in the job mar-
RISKY
ket. Anything to get a leg up against the
competition is helpful, given that most
folks in the industry freelance.
42 POPSCI.COM SPRING 2022
COMMENT MODERATOR
ASSESSING THE LEGALITY and safety of
notions people post online might not be vis-
cerally smelly, but moral disgust can have
physical side effects. Think of revulsion as
a kind of behavioral immune system. Some
evolutionary psychologists suggest our ten-
dency to get emotionally squicked out is tied
to the same instinct that keeps us from eat-
ing things that could make us sick— yes,
retching over immorality may have the
same root as puking over piles of maggots.
Avoiding fraught situations may not keep
you from getting food poisoning, but it’s still
self-protective in the social sense. RISKY
Like the job itself, research on the effects
of moderation is in its infancy. But with an
estimated 100,000 people working in the
field—and some evidence that they can de- CREEPY
velop symptoms of post- traumatic stress
disorder—psychologists say we must grap-
ple with the enormous mental toll of sifting
through the worst of the internet.
 SCIENCE’S DIRTIEST JOBS

MAGGOT FARMER

LARGE-SCALE MAGGOT farming focuses on the

alchemy of turning trash into sustenance. The
CREEPY protein-rich fly babies are perfect for feeding farmed
chicken and fish—and with global food scarcity
looming, that market may be broadening to include
STINKY the rest of us. But how do we turn the writhing
hordes that swallow roadkill into nutritious grub?
It starts simply: by letting flies squirt their eggs
in the vicinity of organic waste—poop, offal, rot—
TEN and allowing their darling offspring to hatch and
T

RO
eat to their hearts’ content. Harvesting the mag-
gots, well, that’s a little more complicated. Some
farmers create escape tubes for the larvae to crawl
into on their own. Others harness the power of the
sun, smearing infested manure over a sieve so the
squirmers dig away from the light and fall into a
FECAL tub. And then there’s the water method, in which
harvesters flood the fetid feeding grounds with
water, sending a mass of maggots floating, to be
scooped up and gathered from some kind of unholy
approximation of a cranberry bog and mashed into
a protein-rich slurry. Bottoms up!

BODY FARM FORENSIC ANTHROPOLOGIST

EVERY YEAR ROUGHLY 4,400 unidentified corpses

turn up in the US alone. To figure out who they were
and how they died, one must factor in how different cir- CREEPY
cumstances can affect decomposition. Traditionally,
court cases used data from pigs and rabbits to deter-
mine time of death, but humans break down differently.
We know that thanks to the University of Tennessee,
BLOODY
Knoxville’s Forensic Anthropology Center, which was
the first facility of its kind when it opened in 1987.
Donated corpses lie around the joint—known as
EY

the Body Farm—in a variety of experimental condi-

tions. They might nestle under a few inches of topsoil,
O

G O
hide haphazardly in the underbrush, or get pinned un-
derwater. All so grad students, faculty, and visiting
STINKY
researchers can watch (and smell) them rot. Putrescine,
which evokes old fish, and cadaverine, which smacks of
ripe roadkill, are two notoriously funky compounds pro-
duced when amino acids break down. But this isn’t just
an olfactory assault: Work at the Body Farm requires TEN
ROT

keeping all the senses on high alert. One might observe

and photograph munching beetles, for instance, to col-
lect info on how their appetites can shape a crime scene.
44 POPSCI.COM SPRING 2022

HUMANITY TUCKS A LOT of its dirty secrets in the drink. Hazmat

divers have the technical skills—like accreditation in underwater
FECAL RISKY welding—to clean up when those pent-up truths cause gruesome
accidents. Think fixing ruptured nuclear reactors and scouring the
TEN ELI insides of septic tanks. To do such risky work under such disgusting
T
N
GRU

G
RO

conditions, divers wear sealed helmets and suits of thick vulcanized

rubber, lest the fetid fluids they swim through get inside their gear
and into their vulnerable orifices. Once the swimmers surface, they
require thorough decontamination. They’re so noxious, even the
MOIST STINKY folks hosing and scrubbing them down have to wear protective gear.
The psychological burden of kicking through feces is significant.
HAZMAT But on the bright side, the skills required mean that if bobbing in
crude oil for dead bodies becomes too much, these professionals are
DIVER well equipped to take on repairs in clean and safe waters too.
 SCIENCE’S DIRTIEST JOBS

MATERIALS SCIENTIST, HAGFISH SLIME

HAGFISH SLIME IS a remarkable substance. When threatened, the phallic-

looking fish secrete goo from lines of glands that line their flanks. When the

EY
ooze hits the water, it expands by a factor of 10,000 in less than a second. In

O
addition to creating an extremely icky barricade to ward off predators, the G O
muck can gum up gills and choke even fearsome sharks. Composed of mu-
cus and a network of silklike protein threads, the gunk may one day play MOIST
an important role in manufacturing materials for ballistics shields and fire-
fighting. But for researchers to study it, they have to harvest it.
Zoologists trigger this slimy reaction by pinching hagfish on the tail with
forceps. Like dropping a value-size tub of hair gel on the floor, handling these
critters involves a high degree of slip. Case in point: In 2017, a truck carrying
7,500 pounds of hagfish destined for South Korean dinner plates overturned,
sliming an entire Oregon highway and covering a whole Nissan sedan.
46 POPSCI.COM SPRING 2022

ELI CLEANING THE LIQUID remains of ancient flora

N
GRU

and fauna off of flailing and dying marine life is dirty

G

work—especially since the mess gets worse over time.

RISKY Fouling, or oiling, as it’s called, leaves birds unable to
fly. The goop covers everything in its path too quickly
STINKY for rescuers to save every organism, so slicked beaches
EY

sometimes fill up with dead fish. In life, the swimmers

are packed with trimethylamine N-oxide, a compound
O

G O
that protects them from the high pressure of the ocean.
TEN In death, that turns into trimethylamine, more com-
T
RO

monly known as the dreaded rotten fish smell. There’s

nothing like the pungent vapors of climate doom mixed
with notes of gas station sushi in the morning.
Manually scrubbing up an oil spill means using
MOIST
gloves and shovels and rakes and industrial vacuums,
skimming through the water to catch the hydrophobic
mess floating on top, and then setting the sea on fire to
burn away what’s left. Toxicity from exposure to the
myriad noxious compounds involved can lead to skin,
OIL SPILL CLEANER eye, neurological, and breathing problems.
 SCIENCE’S DIRTIEST JOBS

MEDICAL HOSPITALS, PATHOLOGY LABS, and other places where the in- T
TEN
sides of bodies make their way outside all generate biohazardous

RO
WASTE waste. That refuse can’t go into the trash raw because it can carry
BLOODY
pathogens, radioactivity, or chemotherapy residue. Even some-
COOKER thing routine like a busted appendix can’t just slip into a flip-top
STINKY
garbage can. There are several ways to make such tissues more
benign, including popping viscera into high-temp autoclaves that
subject them to steam sterilization. That’s right: They get cooked. FECAL
The unceasing demand for waste disposal makes this a steady
job regardless of market fluctuations, and some employers (be they
hospitals or specialized outside vendors) provide on-the-job train-

EY
ing. The downside is that braising a body part creates all sorts of…

O
aromas. When a technician throws a bag of tumor or placenta or G O
pus-soaked hospital linen into what is essentially a weapons-grade
Instant Pot, it can create a veritable smorgasbord of odors—a fetid MOIST
amalgam of puke and iron and hot flesh that smells a little too much
like barbecue. There are a few ways to help mitigate the stink, such
as using mechanical scrubbers that wash the air, adsorptive filters
that catch the funk, or even little dots of topical camphor rub above
the top lip, but let’s be real: This gig is not for the faint of nose.
POPSCI.COM

ILLUSTRATIONS BY
RENAUD VIGOURT

PG 48
 SPRING 2022

CAVE OF

W NDERS
0

THE WRIGGLING RESIDENTS OF THE DARKEST, WETTEST, AND MOST

TOXIC PLACES MAY HOLD SECRETS TO A BETTER LIFE FOR US ALL

BY SARAH SCOLES
 THE AIR
INSIDE SULPHUR CAVE in Steamboat Springs, Colorado, is
full of poisonous hydrogen sulfide and lethal levels of carbon
dioxide. The cavern, blocked off with a three-board fence,
has hosted few visitors. Old editions of the Steamboat Pilot
newspaper detail the few earlier expeditions, like when 1930s
spelunkers wearing gas masks could manage going inside
only in four-minute spurts. Or when a 1960s speleologist with
an oxygen supply thrust himself, convulsing, back toward the
entrance and had to be dragged into fresh air.
David Steinmann wasn’t intimidated, though. “The most
deadly gas is actually what bubbles out of soda,” he says,
smiling. Steinmann, an environmental consultant and re-
search associate in the zoology department of the Denver
Museum of Nature & Science, is also a volunteer fire-
fighter and plenty used to inhospitable spaces.
Putting on the requisite protective gear for a trip un-
derground felt similar to donning a breathing apparatus
to fight flames. It was 2007, and the Colorado Grotto of
the National Speleological Society had organized an expe-
dition to the cave, enlisting 10 experts to study the strange
space’s geology, biology, history, and water chemistry.
Steinmann was there to sniff out new species. It’s kind of
his deal. He’s discovered more than 100 previously uniden-
tified organisms. And that day 14 years ago, Sulphur Cave
was about to turn up another.
The other scientists let Steinmann go first, before they
crawled on stuff or otherwise disturbed anything. Kitted out
with a self-contained breathing apparatus, he scooted into
the entrance—about the size of a hot tub and flush with the
ground. It was mucky, then wet, slippery, and gross, ulti-
mately descending 25 feet under the surface and measuring
around 180 feet long. His favorite. Unpleasant places, he knew,
are where novel beings make nice lives for themselves.
As Steinmann continued, he recognized colonies of mi-
crobes hanging from the ceiling, dripping mucus-like acid
that could burn a hole through a shirt and give the skin
what he jokingly calls “a little sunburn.” Named snottites
(cavers have a sense of humor), these organisms survive
toxic-to-us sulfur compounds.
When Steinmann slunk farther in, he soon saw a spring
collecting into a couple of pools—each about 5 feet across
and more toxic with hydrogen sulfide than volcanic vents
at the bottom of the ocean. And in the pools, worms. Tens
of thousands of tiny, red, wriggling tubes, clustered to-
gether in the hundreds. An inch or two long and only as
wide as pencil graphite, they looked, in the aggregate, al-
most like sea anemones, or overly starched angel-hair
pasta. “I’d never seen anything like that before in my life,”
he says. “It was a very unusual environment. And I just
50 SPRING 2022 » POPSCI.COM
thought, These have to be something new.”
Steinmann was right: After years of analy-
sis, he and a team of researchers were able
to announce that these blood-colored crea-
tures, now called Limnodrilus sulphurensis,
were a brand-new species, so far found only
in this cave and one nearby hot spring.
But more than being simply new, the
worms might be utilitarian. L. sulphurensis
are part of a class of organisms called ex-
tremophiles, a term for beings that thrive in
the far-flung fringes where humans gener-
ally do not. Some love salt. Others embrace
frigidity. Still more bask in radioactivity, me-
tallicity, acidity, heat, dryness, darkness. It
turns out they often produce chemicals that
humans can use to make our comparably
tame existence even cushier.
The fruits of extremophiles’ quiet, evolu-
tionary labor now go into everything from
detergent to medicine. But exotic wrigglers
in particular seem to be promising sources
of antibiotics, ones that might even work
against drug-resistant pathogens. Having
lived with colonies of bacteria that they
both need and need to fight, the critters
may have developed biochemical coping
mechanisms that could find their way into
pills you buy at the pharmacy.
Learning how extremophiles might help
modern society requires that someone dis-
cover them, investigate their potential
utility, then reproduce their natural habits
in an industrial setting. None of those are
small tasks, or ones that can be completed
in short order, which is why, 14 years after
the Sulphur Cave discovery, the process of
figuring out if or how L. sulphurensis might
prove useful continues. The initial step
in that process is often a slippery, smelly,
messy one—into the places on Earth people
were least meant to be. In these spots, bio-
logical innovation lurks, living as it has for
eons. “There’s still a lot to be discovered,”
says Steinmann, “and a lot of unknowns.”
In Sulphur Cave, Steinmann stooped to
scoop up samples of the worms and unbury
them from their horrible-to-us habitat.
Someone else collected data on the cham-
ber’s microbiology, its bacterial soup—the
very mélange the creatures had had to de-
velop defenses to live within. Nearby, a
veteran deep-cave explorer and mapper
went into a crack and reappeared empty-
handed, red-faced, and barely able to
breathe, covered in goo.
 T pigment protects them from the sun. Some halophiles can
TODAY, CHEMICALS FROM extremophiles
go into lactose-free milk, insecticides, laun-
dry soaps, pigments, biofuels. But people
have turned to them for help for thousands of
years. “Halophiles are technically mentioned
in the Bible,” says James Coker, director of
Johns Hopkins University’s Center for Bio-
technology Education, referring to salt-loving
organisms. The Old Testament scribes didn’t
mention halophiles by name, of course. The
word germ hadn’t yet been uttered in any lan-
guage. But peep the talk about salt harvesting,
says Coker: Those long-ago humans knew it
was mining time when the crystals turned
red—a shift caused by microorganisms whose
live happily in water 10 times more saline than the ocean;
other -philes occupy similarly extra niches, like the cooling
pools of nuclear reactors. “For them, of course, it’s not ex-
treme,” says Coker. “It’s where they live. It’s like asking us,
‘How can you live in 75 degrees?’”
People who go out looking for such beasts are sometimes
called bio-prospectors. They trek the globe to find organisms
that live in extremis. “They dig around in the dirt, take samples
of ice down in Antarctica, go into the weird lakes of Australia
and Yellowstone, and just collect things, then come back to the
lab and try to figure out if it’s new or not,” says Coker.
After Steinmann emerged from Sulphur Cave, he got in
touch with a worm expert at the United States Geological
Survey, who brought together an international team to iden-
tify and characterize the eyeless crimson noodles. Based at
six universities from Boulder, Colorado, to Rostock, Germany,
they were biologists, zoologists, molecular physiologists, ge-
ologists, worm specialists. Steinmann and the Colorado
contingent went back to the source three more times to
51
 gather additional samples and do environmental studies.
After a 2009 expedition, Steinmann packaged up worms
preserved in ethyl alcohol and sent them to Europe for DNA
analysis. He also shipped a batch of live specimens in an aer-
ated container full of cave water and algae. They took to it.
“That’s easy living, in this aquarium with oxygen and food,”
he says, “compared to that crazy cave.”
Nutrients, in those dark and cold spaces, are hard to come
by, Steinmann explains, sitting in a Colorado food court sur-
rounded by easy calories. In the caves pocking the mountains
just west of him, most organisms skim their energy from the
poop of larger animals that venture underground—pack rats,
marmots, hikers—or from the occasional decaying log that
falls through the entrance. That waste, though, can stick feet-
thick to the floor, locked in both time and space like rock strata.
Steinmann wasn’t always attuned to the extreme life of
caves. The bug for such exploration bit him in the 1990s,
when a speleology convention came to Colorado, bringing
with it cave biologist David Hubbard, who had dived beneath
the surface throughout the state. “In a week, he found like 10
new species,” says Steinmann.
At the time, he was working as a stream biologist, collect-
ing and analyzing invertebrates and water bugs. Running a
company called Professional Wetlands Consulting, he’s done
projects for the US Forest Service, golf courses, ski resorts,
housing developments, and school systems, all of which
need maps of wetland boundaries, environmental analy-
sis, and inventories of species to understand the impact
construction or expansion will have on the aqueous areas.
Scrambling and sliding underground was simply his occa-
sional hobby, which he’d dabbled in since high school. But
like a rockfall, an idea fell on him: He could combine work
and play. “I just started looking for life,” he recalls. Now, as
a research associate with the Denver Museum of Nature &
Science, Steinmann has revealed dozens of previously un-
known organisms underground in Colorado. He’s an expert
in new-thing discovery, but he leaves the deep lab investiga-
tion on the potential applications to others. He’s more of a
bio-peeper than a bio-prospector.
Across the pond, researcher Christer Erséus of the Uni-
versity of Gothenburg in Sweden was tasked with doing
genetic analysis on the L. sulphurensis worms. The team
studied the creatures’ network of vessels that easily absorb
scant oxygen. Their vital fluids have high oxygen binding
capabilities. “I’m always joking that certain athletes would
love to have worm blood,” says Steinmann. But the squig-
glers were thin as lace and long, making the draw tricky.
In a month, the DNA results came back. The worms were
like nothing anyone had ever seen before. But even with
that genetic certainty, gathering enough information to an-
nounce and characterize a new species is a trial. It took the
group—all of whom were also working on other projects—
nine years to establish the species’s taxonomic place and to
publish papers in Zootaxa and Hydrobiologia detailing its
existence, anatomical characteristics, and home: the most
unpleasant spot in Steamboat Springs.
52 SPRING 2022 » POPSCI.COM
N
NOT LONG AFTER publication in 2016, Stein-
mann connected with a French researcher
named Aurélie Tasiemski, who specializes
in the antibiotic potential of extreme worms.
L. sulphurensis isn’t like the critters
Tasiemski normally works with. A biolo-
gist and associate professor at the Center
for Infection & Immunity of Lille, Institut
Pasteur of Lille in northern France, she fo-
cuses on tinier ones, usually from marine
environments. But this American variety
captured her thoughts because of its sulfury
homestead. “From my experience, worms in-
habiting such extreme habitats are interesting
sources of novel antibiotics,” says Tasiemski,
who was the first scientist to investigate
exotic worms’ antimicrobial potential, pub-
lishing her initial paper about regular leeches’
antibiotic prowess in 2004 and her first arti-
cle on a weird sea worm in 2014.
Steinmann offered to send her some
L. sulphurensis to study and from which to
perhaps extract antimicrobial peptides—
compounds made of amino acids that can
take down bacteria. But doing so called for
fresh, live specimens, and collecting them
required planning another expedition, get-
ting permits from Steamboat Springs,
gathering a team, taking the precautions
that keep one alive in Sulphur Cave, and
then successfully shipping the worms to
Europe. With Steinmann’s full-time job and
other spelunking expeditions, along with
pandemic complications, the new harvest is
taking a while. But he plans to send worms
across the Atlantic in 2022.
Once the wrigglers arrive, Tasiemski will
know exactly what to do. She’s been study-
ing unusual worms since early in her career,
starting with leeches around 2000, then
moving on to squirmers from oceanic hy-
drothermal vents in the 2010s. “I was very
interested by the biology of not-typical or-
ganisms,” she says. “I think it’s because
everyone doesn’t care about them.” She
likes an underwater underdog, and she
wanted to understand how worms could
have adapted to live in what she calls “such
crazy physical environments.”
The answer, which she discovered and
first published in 2014, is that they can co-
exist with bacteria that help them—as our

microbiome helps us—and zap the bacteria
that would hinder them. They have specific
immunity, able to produce peptides that tar-
get only the bad guys. She discovered such
compounds (which humans also possess) in
Alvinella pompejana, also called the Pompeii
worm, that could work as antibiotics for
particularly gnarly pathogens. After two
collecting cruises in the East Pacific Rise, a
tectonic plate boundary, in 2010 and 2012, it
took her three months to find and purify their
peptides. She patented both ideas right away.
Tasiemski and her colleagues—including
former graduate student Renato Bruno—
have spent years venturing into the ocean
in search of additional specimens. “The
problem is that for like 1,000 worms, you
have to spend weeks and weeks of sam-
pling,” says Bruno. After they acquire the
animals, they have to freeze them immedi-
ately on the boat and keep them cold until
they get back to the lab. (Sometimes other
bio-prospectors bring back live creatures to
their labs, where they foster their growth
and reproduction and see in real time what
compounds they produce.)
Tasiemski’s team sorts the wrigglers from
the grains of sea sand, whose size isn’t dis-
similar to theirs. Separated, the worms then
need to be ground into a sort of paste, an ac-
tion Tasiemski mimes with a motion like that
of crushing herbs with a mortar and pestle.
The paste contains everything the crea-
ture has to offer, and her team wants only
the antimicrobial peptides. Luckily, these
have a specific, small dimension. A spe-
cialized piece of lab equipment called a
high-performance liquid chromatograph
analyzes each component by sifting for pre-
cise molecules. The researchers mix the
sample with a liquid solvent, which the ma-
chine pumps through a solid material. The
solid snatches particles of different sizes
and compositions in different ways, sepa-
rating them like a high-tech sieve.
Isolated pure peptides land in bacteria-
laden petri dishes. After a day or two, if the
compound worked, the dish shows a germy
outer ring and a blank disk in the middle
NORMAN R. THOMPSON
where the defense vanquished the bacteria.
Tasiemski’s lab analyzes the structures
and the bacteria-killing properties of prom-
ising peptides. This lets them identify the
molecular compositions that help them to
keep their antibiotic effect in salty, acidic, hot,
cold, or high-pressure conditions. “We found a
CAV E O F WO N D E R S
correlation between the structure of the molecule and the en-
vironment in which the worm is found,” says Bruno. Certain
constructions evolved to work in specific conditions—and all
these adaptations could, potentially, be harnessed for human
hardiness. Antimicrobial peptides seem to work particularly
well against so-called ESKAPE pathogens, six supervirulent
germs that are also resistant to antibiotics.
Scientists have known about the natural world’s an-
timicrobial peptides, and their applications for human
immunity, since the early 1980s, and have since discovered
more than 3,000 of them. Only a couple of dozen of those
compounds, though, have come from worms.
The biochemical adaptations of wrigglers hold promise in
part because they live in places where they never come into
contact with bacteria that hurt humans. Their properties are
novel, then, to the germs that make us sick. “The bacteria
doesn’t know how to escape,” Tasiemski says. Plus, worms’
peptides, usually produced by their skin, can stand up to the
extreme temperatures of the outside environment, meaning
they don’t need ultrarefrigeration like many such medicinal
ingredients. “You can keep them on the table,” she says. It
also means that future antibiotics won’t be harmed by the
temperature of a fevered human body, as some drugs are.
Once her lab has isolated and characterized the peptides,
Tasiemski doesn’t have to grow worms to get more of their
chemicals. They can be synthesized.
Today, Tasiemski is testing her patented peptides on
mice, which will take about two years. If they do well in the
rodent world, the trials will eventually move on to humans.
That direct-patient work will fall to someone else, and
will, if it succeeds, require partnerships with pharmaceu-
tical makers, for both testing and large-scale production.
“For the moment, we don’t need to be associated with a big
Masses of Limnodrilus sulphu-
rensis worms thrive in the toxic
springs of Sulphur Cave.
 CAV E O F WO N D E R S

company,” she says. “But we’re going to need to.”

Tasiemski is hopeful that investigation into the sulfur-
loving Steamboat Springs worm will prove similarly
fruitful. But she loves the thrill of discovery more than
finding applications. “Wow, I’m the first to see these,” she
recalls thinking of her own finds, like novel hydrother-
mal vents in the Pacific Ocean. It was strange, bobbing
in the water, to think that no human had ever laid eye-
balls on these spots before. And it was strange to think
that in understanding organisms’ survival there, she
could help us with our own.

TO DATE, the FDA has approved just seven of the more

than 3,000 known antimicrobial peptides for use in
pharmaceuticals, like the over-the-counter ointment
Neosporin. All came either from nonextreme bacteria
or derivatives of other such peptides and spent around
15 years or more in development between discovery and
approval. Though scientists have studied others, those
inquiries stalled out before clinical trials. Sometimes
the peptides weren’t as effective in the lab as they had
seemed in their natural environment. Sometimes they
had effects likely to be toxic on human biochemistry.
Sometimes they were unstable.
Getting to the clinical stage at all represents its own
hurdle: Researchers like Tasiemski need to pass the task
to researchers with connections to, if not Big Pharma, at
least small pharma. Explorers like Steinmann, academ-
ics like Tasiemski, and the industrialists who could bring
their work to a wider audience occupy different niches.
It takes a long time, when it happens at all. But on the
scale of the evolution of extremophile animals, it is, one
supposes, the blink of an annelid eye.
But the extremophiles-for-capitalism movement will
coalesce, Johns Hopkins’ Coker maintains. “This is going
to happen,” he says. There is too much potential lurking
in vents and caves, and too much money to be made, for
nature’s secrets to remain shrouded. And Coker is think-
ing even further afield, about how things could turn out
when humans go to Mars and look for life in a place that
has Earth’s extremes of cold dryness.
Steinmann, though, remains firmly grounded on—
and also deep inside—this planet, and he hopes to find
even more beings who’ve carved out ecological caverns
for themselves. “Much is unknown right here in our own
backyard in America,” he says, gazing across the food
court. “I found new species in my woodpile.”
Spotting those surprises just requires getting dirty,
and looking more closely, to see that the world isn’t as
nailed-down as it seems, that there is potential bub-
bling in puddles and cracks: Life, living in its own ideal
conditions, whose hardships may help us. “We can steal
all their secrets,” says Steinmann.

POPSCI.COM » SPRING 2022 55

 POPSCI.COM
TO REALIZE A VISION
OF BUSTLING CITY
STREETS SHARED
SAFELY AND
EQUITABLY AMONG
CARS, BIKES, BUSES,
AND PEDESTRIANS,
ONE PITTSBURGH
COMPANY IS FOCUSED
ON REINVENTING
THE HUMBLE
TRAFFIC LIGHT.
STREET
BY
PETER SIMEK
SPRING 2022

ILLUSTRATIONS
BY
SINELAB

SMARTS
PG 56
DRIVE EAST
ALONG BAUM
BOULEVARD,
A FOUR-LANE thoroughfare through
Pittsburgh’s East Liberty neighborhood,
and you may notice something unusual.
The road, like many in the largely up-and-
coming area, passes auto shops, fast-food
joints, brick warehouses, and parking lots
that bleed into cookie-cutter luxury apart-
ments and gleaming, glass-faced retail,
including a Whole Foods and a Target. As
you near the neo-Gothic spire of the East
Liberty Presbyterian Church—towering
over trendy restaurants, bars, and a Goo-
gle office—you may start to realize that the
lights seem to go in your favor. Red signals
turn green, and green ones linger just long
enough for you to slip through.
58 SPRING 2022 / POPSCI.COM
At each junction, a curbside controller
cabinet is wired into the signal, and inside
is a briefcase-size box made of brushed
chrome. The container holds the compo-
nents of the artificially intelligent Surtrac
system, which makes decisions based on
what it spies through the city’s traffic cam-
eras. Short for Scalable Urban Traffic
Control, it’s one of the first to gather in-
formation on vehicular flow and use it to
adjust lights in real time—so-called adap-
tive traffic control. After installation at
nine intersections in 2012, travel time
dropped by 26 percent and time spent
idling at red lights by 40 percent.
Pittsburgh is a prime candidate to
pilot Surtrac’s tech. The system came out
of Traffic21, a transportation research
group at Carnegie Mellon University, and
pre-pandemic numbers saw residents lose
an average of 45 hours to congestion every
year. Though that’s about 10 less than the
US norm, according to Texas A&M Trans-
portation Institute’s 2021 Urban Mobility
Report, it’s gotten steadily worse since the
group began keeping records in 1982.
Generations of engineers have at-
tempted remedies in countless cities,
mostly involving redesigning streets. But
a seminal 2011 study by two economists—
Matthew Turner and Gilles Duranton, then
both at the University of Toronto—found
that whenever an urban area increased its
road capacity, driving increased as well.
Their research built on this concept of “in-
duced demand” and put hard numbers to
what motorists intuitively knew: Even the
widest roads still get clogged.
A history of car-centric planning
decisions—from overbuilt streets to ubiq-
uitous free parking—has not only eroded
many neighborhoods but also warped how
we use and value city space. To help address
this, the federal government has man-
dated that towns dedicate a percentage of
their infrastructure investments to “com-
plete streets” efforts that incorporate the
needs and safety of pedestrians, cyclists,
and transit. Smart signaling, which market
analysis firm Navigant Research says will
be a $3.8 billion global business by 2028,
could help enable that change. If cars move
more efficiently across fewer lanes, then
municipalities can open up the reclaimed
turf. “Adaptive traffic control is making
more efficient use of existing roadways and
infrastructure,” explains Christopher Lein-
berger, emeritus professor and chair of
George Washington University’s Center for
Real Estate and Urban Analysis.
Surtrac has competition for its share
of the grid from tech giants and startups
alike. Fortunately for the 22 cities already
using it—including Atlanta and several
New England towns—it’s relatively cheap,
it’s easy to install and maintain, and it taps
existing infrastructure like streetlight
cameras. The computer at each intersec-
tion is its own node that crunches a range
of scheduling options and then adjusts
signal timing every second while passing
insights to neighboring lights. This decen-
tralized approach makes Surtrac ideal for
regulating unpredictable urban traffic and
for gradual expansion.
What it’s not exactly ideal for—yet—is

pedestrians and bicyclists. People on foot
or pushing pedals noticed that they were
waiting longer at corners, while cars were
idling less. That’s because the system’s data
collection tools, primarily cameras trained
on vehicles, reflect a bias for cars. It’s a re-
minder that making efficient use of roads
will require updated tech and infrastructure
(sidewalks, bike lanes, transit) for walkers,
bikers, passengers, and drivers alike.
While the Pittsburgh network has grown
to include 50 smart intersections—and the
city plans even more—Surtrac’s creators,
including CMU research professor of ro-
botics Stephen Smith, have been reworking
its analytics. They want to incorporate pe-
destrian data from a phone app, route info
from connected vehicles, GPS pins from
electric bikes and scooters, and other data
on what’s known as multimodal transit.
“Very early on, we started thinking about
these other modes of travel,” Smith says.
LONDON INSTALLED the world’s first
traffic light in 1868 after two members of
the British Parliament were injured and a
policeman killed at a particularly chaotic
intersection near Westminster Bridge. Its
design was simple: At night, a gas lamp
signaled red for stop and green for go; in
daylight, paddles supplemented the dim
glow. As automobiles began to take over
downtowns at the beginning of the 20th
century, cities scrambled to find ways
to keep their streets safe. In 1914, Cleve-
land introduced the first electric traffic
signal, and in 1922, Garrett Morgan filed
the patent for a three-position system in
San Francisco. Over the decades, timing
schemes became more sophisticated, but
at its core, the signal is a light on a clock.
The last significant leap took place in
the middle of the 20th century, when en-
gineers began developing adaptive traffic
control setups. Sensors buried in road-
ways would collect real-time traffic data
to help inform signal timing. Since then,
such systems have proliferated, espe-
cially in Europe. The Dutch, for instance,
tap in-ground sensors to manage flow and
prioritize the movement of bicyclists and
pedestrians. In the US, however, most sig-
nals still operate on a timer system.
In 2009, the billionaire industrialist
Henry Hillman decided his hometown of
Pittsburgh could do better. Its traffic con-
gestion problems weren’t as bad as those of
most large US cities, but Hillman had the
means to do something about them. His
foundation donated to CMU with a writ to
work on solutions—a prompt that eventu-
ally led to Traffic21, an institute charged
with devising novel transportation tech
and using the city as a lab to test it.
Hillman’s grant came at a time when
Pittsburgh was looking to reinvent itself.
Mayor Luke Ravenstahl dreamed of lead-
ing the postindustrial steel town into a new
era built on research and entrepreneur-
ship. Traffic21’s executive director, Stan
Caldwell, began searching for where to
start. Civil engineers consistently pointed
to the proliferation of traffic cameras: The
tools offered lots of data about how folks
moved around, but the people sitting in
control rooms didn’t have the training to
manage or interpret it. “They were saying,
‘We don’t know how to turn that data into
information,’” Caldwell recalls.
Avoiding the high cost of advanced in-
ground sensor systems like those in the
EU, Traffic21 quickly focused on seeing
what it could do with only the lowly traffic
signal. The challenge fell to Smith. Over his
nearly 30 years at CMU, his research had
centered on using artificial intelligence to
solve scheduling problems, like managing
supply chains or automating emergency
responses to natural disasters. He saw po-
tential for applying those skills to traffic.
A few researchers had already tried
to use AI for signal scheduling. Smith
identified two main problems with those
attempts: One was that even advanced sys-
tems tended to gather real-time data and
use it to refine preset signal timing sched-
ules only every year or so—as opposed to
instantaneously adjusting or making pre-
dictions. Second, the sophistication of the
signals was restricted by the computing
power you could fit into a light.
The answer hit Smith, somewhat poet-
ically, when he was stuck at a red light in
East Liberty. He happened to glance up at
the signal, and he noticed the traffic cam-
era. “It seemed like a low-cost way of trying
out the technology since the detection was
already there,” he says.
If the eyes were in place, Smith and
his team would need only to develop data
processing tools powerful and compact
enough to fit into the hardware that con-
trolled the stoplights. Many of Smith’s AI
systems manage complicated decision
STREET SMARTS
making by distributing tasks across teams
of “robots”—a concept known as edge com-
puting. With traffic signals, each light could
tap computer vision to detect vehicles ap-
proaching and leaving the intersection,
apply schedule-optimization algorithms to
make signaling decisions, and then share
that info with other lights in the network.
Because each node handles its own
scheduling, the approach is adaptable in
unpredictable urban environments. “We
wanted to design a system that isn’t think-
ing about optimizing in one direction that
we’ve picked ahead of time,” says Greg Bar-
low, who was a postdoc in Smith’s lab and
is now CTO of Rapid Flow, the company he
and Smith founded to market Surtrac.
In 2010, the team approached Pitts-
burgh’s traffic department to collaborate
on developing and rolling out the proto-
type, and the city helped them select nine
intersections in East Liberty. The hard-
ware, about the size of a small desktop
computer, was tucked into free shelf space
in existing signal control cabinets. Almost
immediately, traffic moved more quickly.
The cuts in red light idling also lowered
vehicle emissions in the area by about 21
percent. With help from East Liberty De-
velopment, the nonprofit facilitating the
area’s makeover, and others, the city ex-
panded the pilot to 50 intersections.
Pittsburgh was only a finalist for the $40
million US Department of Transportation
Smart City Challenge grant in 2016, but
the DOT was so impressed with its appli-
cation it committed $10.8 million to fund
connected technology and infrastructure
improvements along six major commuter
corridors. Pittsburgh now plans to invest
nearly $30 million in connecting 150 more
intersections. What remains is to make
sure its vision of traffic goes beyond cars.
FROM RAPID Flow HQ in Pittsburgh, Bar-
low pulls up the Surtrac dashboard and
clicks on an icon representing Quincy,
Massachusetts, a dense Boston suburb and
one of the technology’s earliest adopters.
Tiny green dots indicate Surtrac-equipped
intersections on the town’s grid, each node
holding data like the number and direction
of the vehicles that have moved through
that spot over the past hour and how the
59
“
Many schemes favor one form of transportation
over others, like bicycles and pedestrians.

60 SPRING 2022 / POPSCI.COM


system adjusted timing. Video feeds reveal
Quincy on a cold and wet December night.
As cars near a signal, the software over-
lays them with green, yellow, or red boxes:
Greens will move through the current
“go” signal; reds and yellows tip potential
scheduling changes Surtrac has to weigh.
Clusters of boxes represent one of the
ways Smith streamlined the data pro-
cessing demands at each intersection. As
vehicles approach, the system attempts to
group them into groups that he calls “pla-
toons.” This enables Surtrac to read traffic
not as an endless series of individual autos
but as a variety of units of different sizes.
The AI weighs that information against
empty road space and directs the light to
move each platoon through, like a postal
worker shipping out mail by ZIP code.
Once the autos have moved through
the crossing, the computer relays their
number, speed, and direction to signals
downstream. The traffic light then moves
on to its next batch of data, collects inputs
from its neighbors, and begins again.
To someone watching the demo, it’s ap-
parent why Surtrac ran into problems in
East Liberty. Nick Ross, a bike advocate
and Pittsburgh’s chief traffic engineer, says
the AI brains have potential, but also blind-
ers. “The initial system was very good at
moving cars,” he says. “But it had some of
the inherent flaws that have been identified
about adaptive systems.”
Ross explains that many schemes favor
one form of transportation at the expense
of others, like bicycles and pedestrians. As
Smith and Rapid Flow prepare to expand
Surtrac, they’re working to ease this ten-
sion. The system’s intelligence can adapt
to different kinds of “jobs” at each cross-
ing. “Our model of moving traffic through
an intersection applies equally to pedestri-
ans,” he says. “If there are bike lanes, we
can treat those as separate lanes. We can
fold all that into the optimization.” What is
difficult is developing ways to capture an
accurate look at those varied travelers.
Cameras and radar can do some of the
work, but blind spots remain. Those pre-
existing electronic eyes are focused on
vehicles, and pedestrians don’t move as
predictably as cars—stopping, changing di-
rections, and going against the flow on the
regular. That's why Smith and his team are
trying to capitalize on new data sources. The
result is Routecast, an update to Surtrac
that collects inputs from public transit
GPS, connected cars, and willing e-bike
riders and smartphone-toting pedestrians.
STREET SMARTS
During initial tests, the team found that
when vehicles share their routes with
Surtrac computers, the system can jug-
gle the additional inputs to move all traffic
through the network up to 35 percent more
quickly. In 2018, Smith’s lab also prototyped
an app called PedPal that enables pedestri-
ans with disabilities to communicate with
signals to ensure they have enough time to
safely navigate an intersection.
In the decade since Traffic21 introduced
Surtrac in East Liberty, competing AI sig-
nal models have hit the streets. A company
called NoTraffic, which has run pilot pro-
grams in Arizona and California, installs its
own cameras and offloads some processing
to the cloud. Another system developed by
Siemens Mobility applies machine learning
to the problem. There are promising ef-
forts in the works from IBM and the Alan
Turing Institute in London. Rapid Flow
may be among the most cost-effective of
these solutions: $20,000 per intersection,
compared to NoTraffic’s $115,810.
There may be other ways for such ser-
vices to justify their expense, namely by
offering a new way to price street use. Gov-
ernments rely to varying degrees on gas
taxes to pay for roads, but an auto fleet
shifting toward electric vehicles means
they need to find fresh cash flows. “You
don’t think about paying for the roads as
you drive, and therefore you use them be-
cause they’re free,” urbanist Leinberger
says. “One solution is to get away from gas
taxes and to properly price it per mile ev-
ery time we drive.” That’s why some locales
are considering AI-based curb manage-
ment systems that help regulate limited
street-side space. By monitoring delivery
and ride-share companies that use curbs,
municipalities can attach prices that match
what accommodating them costs.
At the same time, tech that helps bal-
ance competing modes of travel offers an
avenue to safer streets, even when exiling
autos from certain zones the way cities like
London and Brussels have isn’t feasible.
Surtrac’s work in East Liberty improved
flow without seeing a spike in congestion
the way adding lanes would have. That
means the streets could get narrower,
making room for pedestrian and bike infra-
structure without worsening traffic.
How officials choose to balance those
priorities, however, is beyond any AI’s con-
trol. Smith’s robot traffic signals may be as
clever as almost any piece of buzzy “smart
city” infrastructure, but deciding how we
want to shape our future cities is on us.
61
 POPSCI SPRING 2022

Like archival animation cels, the most rarefied

amber specimens reveal stories frozen in time

PHOTOGRAPHS BY Jarren Vink

BY Charlotte Hu
01 Burmese amber, also called burmite, is the
world’s greatest source of Cretaceous fossils. The
swarm of beetles captured here lived among the
last of the great dinosaurs in the valleys of north-
ern Myanmar some 100 million years ago.

63
 is a portal to
the past. The pieces often capture insects and other tiny organisms
in stained-glass mausoleums, providing vivid glimpses of flora and
fauna that lived more than 100 million years ago. Each reveals subtle
clues about how life on Earth evolved—and where it might be headed.
“Because it preserves with such intricacy, you can make detailed com-
parisons with living species,” says entomologist David Grimaldi, who
curates the incredibly diverse amber collection at the American Mu-
seum of Natural History in New York City. “There’s nothing like it.”
Trees create these time capsules when injuries trigger a rush of
wound-sealing resin. The compound seeps slowly over bark, envelop-
ing buggy bystanders in an effective glue trap. Most specimens form
near lakes and rivers, where moist ground or water protects them as
they congeal. Over many millennia, layers of sand and clay bury and
fossilize them, forever capturing one small moment in history.

02 Most Cretaceous earwigs

were strong enough to
escape the sticky snare of
tropical conifers, making
these specimens an un-
usual discovery. Imprints
like this confirm that
descendants of the an-
cient scavengers haven’t
changed much over mil-
lions of years.

64
03 This jagged jewel from Lebanon is approximately 120 million years old,
and fossils from this region contain some of the oldest insect records avail-
able, Grimaldi says. The rough chunk is quite brittle, so his team coated
it with synthetic resin to fill in its myriad cracks.
04 At 500 years old, this specimen from
Colombia is young amber, or a copal. The
resin oozed from a flowering tree called
Hymenaea courbaril found throughout the
tropics of the Western Hemisphere.
Though relatively new, copals can highlight
subtle environmental changes or ecosys-
tem shifts over recent centuries.
05 Trees in the genus Hymenaea from the island of Hispaniola excrete a resin
that is particularly adept at preserving soft tissue. Even after many millions
of years, it’s easy to identify the winged Mastotermes termites jellied in this
relic. The insect’s surviving relatives live only in northern Australia.

67
06 Amber has a way of illumi-
nating critter behaviors,
both ordinary and un-
usual. A pair of mating
leafhoppers were caught
in the act by a resin flow
that created this piece of
Dominican amber 17 mil-
lion years ago.

68
07 As resin trickles toward the ground, it often collects
bark fragments and other debris. Microscopic
examination of this prehistoric Dominican sample
reveals that the structure of the wood within
matches that of modern Hymenaea trees.
08 This centipede met its
doom on an extinct Hyme-
naea tree in Mexico some
17 million years ago.
Miners digging in the
mountains of Chiapas
often find such stones,
which vary in color from
yellow to deep red, among
veins of lignite and clay.
09 Paleontologists and botanists identify the tree
that produced an amber by comparing chemical
compounds in the sample to those of modern
species. In the rare instances that the specimen
includes plant remains like this glazed flower,
believed to be from Hymenaea protera, the re-
sults are easier to confirm.

71
10 The concentric rivulets in this chunk of Dominican amber
formed when one flow ran over another containing some
unsuspecting Proplebeia bees. Workplace casualties are an
occupational hazard for these creatures, which harvest the
gummy secretion to build nests.

72
11 The rich diversity of flora
and fauna in Burmese
amber has revealed a lot
about the early evolution of
social insects. Take, for ex-
ample, this pair of worker
ants from the extinct ge-
nus Gerontoformica.
Closely related species
have even been caught
fighting one another.
74 POPSCI.COM / SPRING 2022

: FROM THE ARCHIVE :

THE RISE
OF THE
RODENTS

HOW SCIENCE CAME

TO RELY ON THE
HUMBLE LAB RAT

SINCE ARISTOTLE, SCIENTISTS have vivisected, poked,

and prodded live animals in pursuit of knowledge
S (Pavlov’s dog, anyone?), but at the turn of the 20th
century, breeding gutter-dwelling creatures to under-
stand our own physiology was becoming a necessity
of experimentation. By the 1920s, lab rats were in
such high demand that they powered an entire American industry.
In fact, some of today’s popular rodent breeds—Jax mice being a
favorite—can trace their roots to the Jazz Age.
Since the passage of the US Animal Welfare Act in 1966, the use of
larger critters has steadily dropped—only 800,000 in 2019—but rats
and mice continue to be on trend. The US uses more than 100 million
of the rodents annually, many genetically engineered for laboratory
perfection. This story, penned by H.C. Davis in our May 1927 issue,
chronicles the emergence of their furry white ancestors.

THE RAT, ANCIENT ENEMY of humankind,

now has been sent to college as the friend
of humankind. While the vicious alley rat
is hunted and destroyed as a carrier of dis-
ease, his favored cousin, the white rat, is
being pampered and educated by science in
remarkable experiments calculated to make
 CURATED BY
BILL GOURGEY

the human race healthier, happier, and wiser.

At Stanford University in California, May 1927 cover story:
500 white rats—carefully bred, fed, and The perils of toiling
in steel-making pits.
housed—recently have undergone intel-
ligence tests which may lead to valuable
discoveries about our mental processes. And
in the Crocker Laboratory of Columbia Uni-
versity, some 9,000 pedigreed members of
the same rodent family are being studied
to learn new secrets of heredity and to gain
useful knowledge in combating disease. In-
deed, scientific institutions throughout the
world today are calling for these long-tailed
creatures in such quantities that the raising
of well-bred rats on a large scale has been es- are employed. One, called the “problem box,”
tablished as an unusual American industry. is a screened enclosure from which a door
In Philadelphia, the Wistar Institute leads to another box containing food. The
of Anatomy and Biochemistry maintains only way the rat, imprisoned in the problem
$60,000 worth of special equipment for box, can reach the food is to step on a small
rearing thousands of the rodents to serve platform at the side of the box. An electric
mankind. From there they are shipped to current releases the door. Each rat under ex-
laboratories in many parts of the world. amination is put through this test once daily

:
THE CHIEF REASON the white rat has be-
come the chosen friend of scientists is that
for 20 days, and a record is made of the time
required to open the door. The records show
the rate at which habit is formed. In addition,
the test is repeated after a lapse of 50 days to
determine ability to retain the habit.
plague-carrying dock and alley kin. A bac-
terial culture, known as “ratinin,” has been
discovered that kills rats but does not harm
humans or domestic animals. Placed on bait,
it spreads an epidemic among the rodents.

in structure, growth, and bodily processes he
resembles human beings. Therefore his re-
actions to physical and intelligence tests can
be counted on, relatively, to throw light on
our mental and physical machinery.
In the study of habit, for example, the Stan-
ford experimenters, under the direction of
professor Calvin P. Stone, have tested the abil-
ity of rats to acquire new habits and to break
old ones. For this purpose ingenious devices
:
ANOTHER APPARATUS, “the maze,” consists
of a labyrinth containing many blind alleys
but only one direct path to the end, where
food is placed. In repeated tests, the num-
ber of false moves, and the time required to
thread the maze, measure ability to learn.
It has been found that the rat develops
physically about 30 times as rapidly as a hu-
man. ... The tests further indicate, according
to Stone, that the rat’s mental development
will prove to be fifty times as rapid as man’s.
Raised in spotlessly clean surroundings,
his hours of sleeping, eating, and exercising
as carefully regulated as a baby’s, the rat
that goes to college is an aristocrat. He en-
ters a university in the pink of condition for
any test. “Preparatory schools” such as Wis-
tar Institute graduate “standardized” rats
each one so like the rest in body and health
that one testing laboratory can compare its
results directly with another’s.

:
IN THE STUDY OF heredity rats have proved
most valuable. To observe four human gen-
erations would require the better part of a
century. In two years, rats have told the same
story, for the laws of heredity governing the
rat family are fundamentally the same as
those governing human life.
Recently laboratory rats have helped This text has been edited to match
show how science can exterminate their contemporary standards and style.
 GOODS
WASH YOUR HANDS // BLAST YOUR SIDING // CLEAN YOUR FLOORS

PHOTOGRAPH BY ALI BLUMENTHAL POPSCI.COM / SPRING 2022 76

CHOICE

GENUINE EVERY MESS PRESENTS A UNIQUE CLEANING

LATHER CHALLENGE. GRAB A BAR THAT SPECIFICALLY
TARGETS WHATEVER FILTH IS ON YOUR HANDS.

1 / FOR BUG BITES 4 / FOR COOKING

Rubbing a Ditch the Itch
Bar directly onto insect bites
provides almost immediate
relief from their infuriating
burn. Tea tree oil helps reduce
inflammation, while glycerin
hydrates the surrounding
tissue without leaving an un-
pleasant residue.
Mrs. Meyer’s Clean Day Soap
combines olive and other oils
with glycerin, an antibacterial
ingredient the FDA recom-
mends over other additives.
Choose from seven scents, like
honeysuckle, clementine, and
lavender, to overpower pun-
gent scents like garlic.

2 / FOR AFTER THE GYM 5 / FOR KIDS

Bacteria find sweaty sur-
faces particularly hospitable.
Defense Soap sports antibac-
terial tea tree and eucalyptus
oils that may help shield you
from staph and other nasty
infections that might lurk on
mats, machines, and other
shared exercise equipment.
Coconut oil and shea butter
in Tom’s of Maine Natu-
ral Beauty Bar cleanse and
moisturize tender skin. The
silky texture and mild scent of
this vegan soap make it gentle
enough for frequent washes.
Plus, the firm bar won't turn
to mush after just a few days.

3 / FOR THE GARAGE 6 / FOR GARDENING

Tiny chunks of ground pumice
give Lava Heavy-Duty Hand
Cleaner the abrasive power to
scrub away gnarly substances
like grease or motor oil without
completely obliterating your
skin. The formula is so effective
it hasn’t changed much since
BY NATASHA ROY its invention in 1893.
The exfoliating oatmeal and
sand in Dr. Squatch Pine Tar
Soap remove dirt and grime
from the top layer of skin with-
out damaging the tissue below.
Aromatics from the tree it’s
named for provide a strong,
woody scent and relieve the
itchiness of poison ivy.
 1

6
GOODS
RANKED
SUPER PRESSURE WASHERS BLAST GRIME WITH A
SOAKERS JET OF WATER. CHOOSE THE RIGHT POWER LEVEL
TO DESTROY DIRT—AND NOT YOUR PROPERTY.
BY STAN HORACZEK
1 / WORX POWER SHARE
PSI: 725
Flow: 1.1 gallons/minute
A pair of 20-volt recharge-
able batteries powers
a pump in this washer
that draws H2O from any
standing water source—
think a bucket, pond, or
pool. A low-maintenance
brushless motor propels
the liquid through the noz-
zle at roughly 11 times the
pressure of a typical gar-
den hose, plenty for simple
jobs like spraying down
bikes after a ride.
2 / SUN JOE SPX 200E
PSI: 1,350
Flow: 1.45 gallons/minute
This 10-amp electric
model weighs less than
10 pounds and fits easily
into most car trunks. The
adjustable nozzle can gen-
erate a laserlike stream
strong enough to blast
mud off your vehicle with-
out damaging the paint.
The pump shuts off com-
pletely when the trigger
isn’t pressed, which cuts
energy consumption.
3 / HART 1800
PRESSURE WASHER
PSI: 1,800
Flow: 1.2 gallons/minute
The most powerful of the
three nozzles that come
with this electric washer
forms a tight spray pat-
tern that helps its 13-amp
motor create more pres-
sure with less water than
similar models. Switch to
a reservoir-equipped soap
tip to get the suds neces-
sary for cleaning siding.
4 / KÄRCHER G 3100 XH
PSI: 3,100
Flow: 2.4 gallons/minute
Upgrading to a gas-powered
model easily doubles the
volume of water you can
move, to an amount that
can potentially hurt you. So
this 65-pounder sports a
rugged, zinc-coated spray
wand with a childproof
safety lock on the trig-
ger. Kärcher also makes
an assortment of add-on
accessories tailored for
specific jobs, like a spin-
ning brush for scrubbing
hard surfaces.
5 / DEWALT DXPW3425
PROFESSIONAL
PSI: 3,400
Flow: 2.5 gallons/minute
This cleaner's 6.5-
horsepower Honda GX200
engine is the same basic
power plant on mowers,
tillers, and plenty of other
yard equipment, which
makes it easy to maintain
and repair. The 25-foot
hose’s sturdy polyurethane
outer coating is durable but
still won’t scuff the surface
you’re cleaning the way a
cheaper one might.
6 / GENERAC
COMMERCIAL 8873
PSI: 4,200
Flow: 4 gallons/minute
Throwing this much wet
stuff this fast can blast
paint off a wall. To manage
all that power (its motor
is, in fact, big enough for
a riding mower), this pro
washer relies on a burly
commercial-grade pump
that runs cool even during
marathon cleaning ses-
sions and doesn’t require
much routine maintenance.
 POPSCI.COM / SPRING 2022 79

6
PHOTOGRAPH BY ALI BLUMENTHAL
ONE PERFECT THING ROBOT VACUUMS DO an ad-
mirable job sucking up dirt and
PILE slaying dust bunnies. But anyone
with kids can tell you they choke
on Legos, and folks with dogs live
DRIVER in mortal fear of Fido leaving a
surprise that turns a small acci-
dent into a cleaning catastrophe.
Many self-driving sweepers
rely on infrared sensors, basic
cameras, and bump detectors to
navigate a space—hence their
penchant for trying to clean what
they shouldn’t. The Roomba j7
adds a front-facing, wide-angle
camera with an LED to the mix,
which helps it detect common
floor-level obstructions. Real-time
computer vision paired with
iRobot's own algorithms helps it
identify potential obstacles as di-
sasters waiting to happen and
BY MIKE EPSTEIN figure out how to avoid them.
Though dog poop is at the top
of the preloaded list of things to
dodge, the j7 also knows how to
recognize other objects that might
clutter your floor—think smart-
phone charging cables—that can
wrap around moving parts and
damage the Roomba as well as
the items themselves. Its artifi-
cial smarts can also ID shoes and
socks, and iRobot plans to use
over-the-air updates to continu-
ally add to the list of objects the
vacuum recognizes.
When the j7 crosses some-
thing it doesn’t recognize, it can
snap a picture and send it to the
Roomba app, so you can tell your
little cleaning buddy to work
around the item or give it a wide
berth. It’ll remember how to deal
with that particular nemesis next
time around. Don’t sweat any
POPSCI.COM / SPRING 2022 80
embarrassing detritus or secu-
rity threats: iRobot says all the
images are fully encrypted and
get deleted after 30 days.
Thanks to its heightened aware-
ness, the j7 also spares your walls
and furniture the bumper-car col-
lisions most robot vacuums rely on
to find their way around. Since it
can see a wall or table leg coming,
it will slow its approach and meet
the obstruction with a gentle tap
rather than a pronounced thud.
IRobot is so confident in the j7’s
navigational know-how that the
warranty includes a Pet Owner Of-
ficial Promise (guess how iRobot
abbreviates it?) to replace the de-
vice if it rolls over pet messes in its
first year in your home.