I have never fallen into quicksand, but like most people, I have been anxious about it at least several times in my life. You have too, right? It’s a real thing — you can be sucked down into the soft liquefied Earth unexpectedly, on hikes or on random walks. One of my friends fell into quicksand in Utah, and she is always prepared, so she knew exactly what to do: move your legs slowly and deliberately, in small, tightly controlled steps. Lay down to spread out your weight. Though it’s counterintuitive, get closer to the ground that is consuming you. Do not waste your energy by struggling mightily to get out, because you will only make it worse. Relax your mind and your body, and you will be released. The point is, the way out is not what your instincts might be screaming at you.
Once upon a time, a lot of animals fell into a similar trap and they did struggle. Millions upon millions of them perished in a field of muck, and now we go visit their skulls and rib cages mounted on plinths in the middle of Los Angeles.
The La Brea Tar Pits and Museum is not a place of quicksand, but of something scarier: reeking asphalt, burbling up from a fissure in our planet, the same one that gives us earthquakes in Southern California. The asphalt is made of the remains of past algae and animals, and it will never tire of swallowing life.
The most interesting thing I learned from the La Brea Tar Pits museum came from my friend (and friend of LWON) Katharine Gammon. There are hardly any nocturnal animal fossils in the collection. This took my breath away.
In the absence of the sun, the asphalt leaking up through Earth’s crust would cool slightly and solidify, so nocturnal animals weren’t as often trapped in the sticky tar. When the sun reappeared to warm the world, the asphalt grew gooey again, and crepuscular and diurnal mammals became the main victims. The danger might have been more visible by late afternoon. But during the early morning crepuscular time, leaf litter could have covered softer parts of the tar pits and kept them insulated — and warmer. When lots of large herbivorous mammals were out and about in the dawn hour, they would walk over the soft parts and get trapped.
You would be amazed by the sheer volume of Pleistocene megafauna that scientists have exhumed from La Brea. Mastodons; camels; saber-tooth cats; scimitar-tooth cats; American lions that look like Mufasa and not the panthers that roam here now; dire wolves, real ones; familiar faces like pronghorn, mule deer, and elk; and I lost track of how many others. I looked for Rodents Of Unusual Size, but just saw a few usual-sized ones.
The museum even has a sadly realistic tableau of a mastodon stuck in the tar, sinking down, and calling out to its family on the edge of a pond. Such large beasts, ready for the taking, would obviously have tempted predators and scavengers, but the cats and wolves hoping to feast on the trapped other creatures were trapped too. The museum has several specimens of Smilodon fatalis, the truly awesome saber-tooth cat. Millions of fossils have been disinterred from La Brea. But they include only a few raccoons and other denizens of the night.
To survive the toxic morass of La Brea, large daytime animals would have been better off walking around at night. The sunshine is what exposed them, while the cool darkness of night could have helped them not only hide, but to quietly survive the quagmire. They might have been better off adapting a new strategy to survive. The point is, the way to safety might not have been what their instincts were telling them.
I am not saying we should not struggle at all. We want to fight to survive, and it’s hard to turn off that instinct. I am saying we should think about other ways to struggle, which might be counterintuitive but more effective. Getting safe might look a little different than we expect. The bog will not stop trying to destroy us, so we have to be creative. We have to be lithe and loose, quick-footed, maybe a little sneaky, maybe hew a bit closer to the darkness than we’re used to. There are ways out of every quagmire.
Top image: By the author Middle image: Wikimedia Commons
Skating monster by Hieronymus Bosch, Wikimedia Commons
This first ran January 3, 2019. I don’t know if Emily ever bought disability insurance or not. — Ed.
“This is a nightmare,” I said to my boyfriend as we walked up to a skating rink in El Dorado Hills, California. The “Family Friendly Winter Wonderland” was in a shopping mall surrounded by faux-Tuscan mansions, and the rink was packed from barrier to barrier. Pete promised peppermint bark and beer if I stuck with our plan, though, so we went ahead and rented skates.
A miniature choo-choo train chugged around the perimeter of the rink, packed with gleeful little boys. Parents lounged around the rinkside bar, day-drinking under heat lamps. No one else seemed concerned about the list of sponsors on the rink’s barrier: Marshall Medical Center, Thayer General Surgery, the West Coast Joint and Spine Center.
When Pete asked me to go ice skating with him over the Christmas holiday, I feigned excitement. Pete grew up in rural Pennsylvania and learned to ice skate as a kid. I grew up near Sacramento, California, where it hardly ever snows. Despite living an hour away from ski resorts in Tahoe, I have never mastered any sport that involves attaching blades, boards or wheels to my feet.
I wanted to be enthusiastic. But then — perhaps my fellow science journalists will relate to this — I made the mistake of entering “ice skating” into PubMed, the United States National Library of Medicine’s online database.
Oh Spring! It’s a season of contrast. Winter has ended (unless you live in Colorado, as I do, and winter continues to return until you’ve mowed the lawn at least once or twice). It’s a time of renewal, when dormant things come back to life. It’s also a time of change and anticipation and unsettledness.
One April day, I published a story about suicide in which the headline writers highlighted data showing that suicides peak in the spring. Researchers don’t know why this is, but I’ve noticed that I tend to get a weird bout of ennui or even mild depression in the spring for no particular reason. It never lasts, and it always confounds me, because I love the sense of possibility and renewal that spring heralds.
I live on a small farm and orchard, and right now it’s a magical place, full of blooming fruit trees and the wondrous fragrance of fruit blossoms. Walking through our orchard when the trees are blooming is one of the things that make me most grateful to be alive. Apricot blooms are my favorite fragrance, but plums are not far behind. Pear trees have a distinct, but less sweet aroma, and the cherry trees are nice, but lag behind the others. Although I enjoy comparing the aroma of the various blooms, what’s most important is to take a moment to appreciate how fortunate I am to be here to experience these natural wonders. I love to stand beneath an apricot tree in bloom, close my eyes and take in the fragrance while listening to the buzz of pollinators visiting the blooms.
The last 100 days have been a doozy (history will have things to say) and I’m trying to lean into the possibilities that spring brings. No matter how bad things seem, the future is not written yet, and it’s important to remember that when you’re tempted to lose hope.
In the last two years I’ve had a number of stressful experiences. And every time I’ve realized: I am really suffering, but this is a very normal experience. People do these things all the time. How did I not realize how amazingly tough all these people are?
For example: my parents both died, about 7 months apart. And I looked around at all my friends who had lost both parents and I thought, how?? How are they just walking around out here like life goes on? And they were like, yeah, we don’t know either.
And then last summer I got a dog. He is the love of my life and the sweetest little man to ever walk this Earth, unless you happen to be sitting in a desk chair when he thinks you should be playing with him, or you approach his door, or you happen to be another dog. And he gets sick (in expensive ways) and he needs to be walked, like, all the time. And I look around me at all these parents and I think: People have actual! human! children! HOW? And they tell me, well, children grow up; dogs are always toddlers. Yeah, but you can legally leave a dog at home alone for hours at a time and feed it dry food out of a bag.
Did you know some people have dogs and children? While holding down full-time jobs? They deserve medals.
Currently I’m engaging in another stressful life event: Moving. I more or less moved in with my boyfriend a year ago, but now I’m finally getting out of my apartment, which I had lived in since 2007. I am physically and emotionally exhausted from sorting all of my belongings and have pains in surprising places. Did you know that some people move more frequently than once every 18 years? I guess these people don’t have 8,000 craft supplies and books, but still, how?
My fellow humans, you are doing some really stressful stuff and making it look easy. I appreciate you. Hang in there.
Photo: Helen Fields, obviously. I dismantled this diorama on Saturday, 11 years after my friends and I made it. Read about it here: Do Peepguins Need Sweaters?
Can I just say this? Those of us born in the 1960s and ‘70s are in a special hell right now. With jobs being taken away and careers being cut short and talents losing out to “influencers” and AI and Bots that Chat, it’s been a uniquely painful time. Those in my generation who chose artistic-scientific careers are facing a one-two kick to the groin, as we see the abandonment of the analog world that shaped our life choices combined with powerful men making those choices moot and the same powerful men gutting science as we know it. As our skills lose their value and a band of merry narcissists take aim at everything we’ve accomplished, our careers are fizzling, our identities crumbling.
One excellent writer I know is gainfully employed…teaching AI how to write more like a human. We are training our replacements. We have no choice. I’m trying to see it as progress but I’m just not there yet.
Going into nature, how long does it take till you feel like you’re there? There meaning not sending emails in your head and not wincing at shifts of temperature or humidity when sun turns to rain? There’s a comfort that comes over you. Hands and the heart are no longer so far apart and pulling a thorn out of your flesh is an afterthought.
Working a Grand Canyon rafting trip this month, I listened to familiar conversation from participants, some mentioning it takes a day or two to let their shoulders down. On day five some are still trying to shake the digital wiring that’s seized our analog minds. On longer trips, by ten days the most tech-hardened have given themselves over to sun-time and star positions. By day twenty-one you’d swear you’ve always belonged here.
When I left the river to hike back to civilization, the guide on the oars who dropped me off along with several others shouted, “Don’t let the wonder killer get you!”
My phone buzzed just as I was finishing filming with the BBC Sky at Night crew for an episode about Mars, having spent the day immersed in the high-resolution panoramas returned by the Curiosity and Perserverance rovers. A text from a researcher wondered if I’d be around to comment on embargoed research from scientists in Cambridge who had ‘found new tentative evidence that a farway world orbiting a different star to the Sun may be home to life’.
I guessed immediately we were talking about the group who, back in 2023, had published what the peer-reviewed paper described as ‘potential signs’ of dimethyl sulfide (DMS), a chemical produced on Earth by plankton, and therefore a possible ‘biosignature’, betraying the presence of life on a small world called K2-18b in orbit around a red dwarf star 124 light-years away.
Such is the interest in (and perhaps desire for) alien life that even this very early hint of the possibility of a detection had garnered plenty of press coverage. Some posted the principal investigator, Prof. Nikku Madhusudhan’s caution that further data from the orbiting JWST would be needed to confirm the detection, but plenty did not. Now, it seemed, these new results were in.
My heart jumped. Aliens! Or at least the possibility of them. I got hold of the press release and the paper it was based on, newly accepted by the Astrophysical Journal Letters (Note that I am an editor for the AAS Journals, which includes ApJL; I had no involvement with, nor knowledge of, this paper during the editing process). Sitting on a rattling train heading back to Oxford, I dug deeply into both. More importantly, I started calling and texting friends and colleagues who work in the difficult business of measuring the properties of planets we cannot even see (K2-18b is only detected by the effect it has when it passes in front of its parent star).
Home, I settled on the sofa, reading the burgeoning literature on K2-18 and DMS which had been sparked by the Cambridge team’s previous results, pinging off requests for clarifications on statistics and astrobiological theory. What emerged over the course of the next few hours was a very different picture from that in the press release.
The detection was still tentative (in the paper it’s ‘3-sigma’, with a 99.4% chance of not being due to chance, but that estimate depends on exactly what one is comparing to what. Whole conference sessions could be devoted to the statistical intricacies.). The search for DMS had been motivated by the idea that the planet might be a nearby example of what Madhusudhan and co call ‘Hycean’ worlds, with a liquid water ocean deep under a thick hydrogen atmosphere, but other modellers think a magma ocean fits the data better. And the chemistry of such a world will be very different from that of the Earth, and so molecules which are biosignatures here – produced on Earth exclusively by life – may be no such thing on a different world, with different chemistry.. (See my Bluesky thread posted from bed early the next morning for details)
It was, frankly, a mess, but that’s to be expected. Barring the arrival of a suitably shiny spacecraft above a major world city, the search for life in the Universe even if it is ulitmately successful will be marked by the slow accumulation of evidence that is bound to often be confusing. That’s ok; in fact, it’s why this sort of science is fun. It was even acknowledged in the paper, which refers, for example, only to a ‘potential biosignature’ in the abstract, and which notes that ‘additional experimental and theoretical work’ is needed, in particular to consider how else DMS might be made.
Looking back at coverage that, in the UK, ranged from a front page in the Sun tabloid (‘The Planet of the, erm, Plankton’ was the headline) to a testy exhange on Radio 4, what strikes me is that gap between the paper and the press release issued by the University. Though it notes caution, suggesting further observations are needed to confirm what’s been seen, the press release does not have any trace of the broader caveats which are in the paper and which other experts raised. The paper reports ‘While [the presence of molecules] DMDS and DMS best explains the current observations, their combined significance…is at the lower end of robustness required for scientific evidence’ but the press release quotes Madhusudhan “The signal came through strong and clear.” Even with a very charitable reading, those are not the same thing.
(The press officer responsible was kind enough to confirm to me that quotes in the release come from interviews they conduct with the researchers, which are then checked by them before release.)
There is caution in the press release (‘It’s important that we’re deeply sceptical of our own results, because it’s only by testing and testing again that we will be able to reach the point where we’re confident in them’) but in it and in Madhusudhan’s interviews and briefings, the caution was attached only to the need for more observations to improve the statistical significance of the result. The myriad broader unknowns – whether DMS could be produced without life, and whether there was evidence for an ocean at all – which were raised by every expert I spoke to – were not mentioned at all. The line ‘Strongest hints yet of biological activity outside the Solar System’ which heads the release might even be true, but there’s still an enormous gap between where we are now and anything ‘strong and clear’.
‘Scientist wants publicity for work’ is hardly news, and nor is ‘researcher more convinced of their own results than their peers are’. This is the normal process of science, and it’s also not surprising that the story flew around the world. The Cambridge press office (who I’m pleased to acknowledge are acting as storytellers, without being instructed to aim for a specific number of hits), and many of the scientists and journalists who reported on the story, did a great job of conveying the nuance of where we are, and I don’t think science is well served by waiting until things are certain before talking about them publically.
We want to show how science, in all its messy, human glory, is done, and allow everyone to follow along as debates are resolved, but I can’t escape the feeling that something has gone wrong here in the translation from scientific paper to newsprint. I’d like to propose a golden rule for press releases:
A release should convey to its audience the same impression of a result that an independent expert would get from reading the paper which describes it itself.
This means obviously that one can’t exagerrate the significance of a result. But it also means that if one knows that the expert audience addressed by a paper will have broad questions, those need to be in the release too. I’m reminded of the late, great Tim Radford’s rule that science journalists should, ‘if an issue is tangled like a plate of spaghetti…regard [the] story as just one strand of spaghetti, carefully drawn from the whole. Ideally with the oil, garlic and tomato sauce adhering to it’. It should be the responsibilty of the press release to point to the existence of the whole plate of pasta, not only present a single delicious piece ready for consumption, even if that’s uncomfortable for the institution or scientist involved.
The idea that we’re close to finding molecules produced by alien plankton, lurking in an impossibly alien sea under the thick clouds of a world that’s closer to Neptune to Earth, enlivens any news bulletin. The search for life is the grand adventure of astrophysics in the next fifty years. But in the journey toward understanding how unusual we are in the Universe there will be many false steps and confusing results, and we need to be able to communicate this mess as we go.
__________
Chris Lintott is an astronomer at the University of Oxford, where he thinks about unusual objects and how to find them. He is also the 39th Professor of Astronomy at Gresham College, which has been providing free lectures to the City of London (and now online) since the 16th century. His favourite spaghetti dish is Pasta Puttanesca.
_________
An artist’s impression based on the Cambridge group’s thoughts about what K2-18b might be like. Illustration: NASA, CSA, ESA, J. Olmsted (STScI), Science: N. Madhusudhan (Cambridge University)
Ben has had to leave LWON but has kindly left us these memories, these posts which we rerun because we like him so much.
Since I published a book about beavers two years ago,I’ve heard from dozens, maybe hundreds, of readers with their own beaver experiences to share. This is a wonderful perk of authorhood: When you tell your own story, you attract others. I’ve gotten emails from folks who have hand-fed blackberries to wild beavers, who have seen beavers build dams entirely of rock, who have watched beavers frolic like seals in the Baltic Sea. Just last month I received the unsolicited memoir of a guy who once resuscitated a drowning beaver. Yes, mouth-to-mouth.
Most writers, I’m sure, get some version of this correspondence.Still, there’s something about beavers — their human-like family structures, their penchant for construction — that seems to foster personal connection.They enter lives in unexpected ways. They channel joy and grief.Today, I want to relate one such saga, courtesy of a woman named Brittany. I’ll warn you that Brittany’s story is about illness and death. It’s also about life and love. And beavers. It’s definitely about beavers.
To begin at the beginning: Brittany grew up in Cuba, New York,a small town near Buffalo, the middle of three children.Her younger brother,Zach, was the sort of troubled, likable smartass we all knew in high school — quick with a joke, surrounded by friends, short-fused, prone to starting bar fights. His blend of charisma and anger reminded Brittany of Tony Soprano. “I don’t know if there was a funnier person,” she told me. “He was also a bastard.” He organized riotous backyard wrestling matches and doted on his beagle, Ralphie; he also drank away his money and got arrested the night of Brittany’s bachelorette party. “One time I said something that pissed him off,” she recalled, “and he took a full plate of lasagna and threw it at the Christmas tree.”
In adulthood, the siblings drifted apart. Zach stayed at home, cycled in and out of college, worked at a cheese factory. Brittany, a high achiever, moved to West Virginia to teach at a university. Around 2010, though, she, her husband, and their kids returned to Cuba after receiving terrible news. Zach, at age 24, had been diagnosed with glioblastoma, an aggressive, almost invariably fatal brain cancer. Brittany’s brother was going to die.
The half-dozen years that followed were hard ones. Zach’s health deteriorated; he lost weight, became mentally foggy. Brittany tried to ease his remaining time by hanging a bird-feeder outside his apartment window. Zach spent his days in bed, leafing through a bird guide he could no longer read, watching cardinals and goldfinches flitting through a world he would soon depart.
One day in 2016, Brittany, along with her sister, her niece, and her mom, took Zach on a final field trip. A lifelong animal lover, Zach had a special thing for turtles; he even owned a painted turtle, a female named Gary, that their sister brought back once from Myrtle Beach. (It’s still alive today, in the care of their mother). Zach’s dying wish was to visit Moss Lake, a turtle hotspot. “I can remember trying to get him in the car — it was so tragic but so funny,” said Brittany, who has a gift for smiling through pain. “It’s horrible because he’s dying, he can’t move. But at the same time, we’re all laughing because his gut is hanging out, he’s swearing, there’s a cigarette coming out of his mouth, his catheter is falling out of his pocket.” Alas, the turtles weren’t out, but it was still a lovely afternoon. In a photo Brittany sent me from that day, Zach sits flanked by his family, five backs to the camera, their arms twined around each other’s shoulders, the dark timber across the lake reflected in the water’s silver bowl.
Two weeks later, Zach died. Brittany’s family poured his ashes into Moss Lake — illegally, which Zach would have appreciated. The turtles surfaced and ate them all.
***
After Zach passed, his family installed a bench bearing his name (and his beagle’s face) in the Cuba cemetery. Brittany visited often that summer. She only cried once, but she grieved in her own way, talking to her brother and wandering the grounds. The cemetery abutted a sprawling wetland that teemed with geese, ducks, and herons. It seemed like a fitting place to mourn a man who adored turtles.
During one of her vigils soon after Zach died, Brittany spotted a V-shaped wake carving through the swamp. The wake was cast, she realized, by the head of a beaver, the first she’d seen. Brittany, a casual but enthusiastic nature-lover, was thrilled. When she next came to the cemetery, she saw beavers again, and again the time after that. Beavers are ordinarily nocturnal, but this colony was bold and active during the day, perhaps because it had habituated to the cemetery’s foot traffic. Soon Brittany was visiting five days a week, for hours at a time. “I’m at the cemetery trying to feel some peace,” she wrote in her journal one day in July. “And I saw the beavers and Zach would have loved them.”
A Cuba cemetery beaver. Photo: Nina Vossler
Peace, at the time, was hard to come by. In the aftermath of Zach’s death, Brittany’s family melted down into chaos and drama; no need to divulge specifics, but suffice to say that, when she compares the situation to Jerry Springer, she may actually be underselling it. The beavers transcended the bullshit. “They were so majestic, so blissfully unaware of the horrors of everything going around,” she recalled. They were, it seemed to her, manifestations of our better natures. They lived in tight family units, like Brittany’s own clan, and they were fiercely devoted to their kits, as Brittany was to her children. But they were also blessedly drama-free, practical, industrious. They did not dread death; they did not betray each other. They were akin to humans, yet superior to them. They also led double lives — sleek and graceful in the water, clumsy and uncomfortable out of it — that seemed to reflect humanity’s own dualism, Zach’s own dualism, how we can at once be so generous and kind and callous and mean, how we all contain multitudes.
Brittany was drinking in those days, maybe a bit too much, and she and her sister would go down to the cemetery with tumblers of gin to talk and sip and watch. Beavers don’t hibernate, and neither did she: When winter arrived, she bundled up and kept going. She’d never been a religious person; after she’d moved back to Cuba, her sister had convinced her to go to church, but her heart wasn’t in it. In beavers, she found her spiritual guides.
“I really started to believe that Zach was in a different place, maybe another realm, whatever you want to call it,” she said. “I never felt that way when I was going to church.” She hesitated, and added, self-consciously,“I know it sounds crazy.”
Spend enough time talking to beaver people, I reassured her, and you hear crazier things.
“I had to see another life force living in a basic, simple way,” she went on. “We’re all living creatures, and humans are no more special than anything else in nature.” There was a kind of comfort in that.
***
Brittany made her pilgrimages to the beavers for two years. And then, one day in mid-2018, they were gone, abruptly and utterly, never to be seen again. Maybe they were wiped out by disease. Maybe they were eaten by coyotes or bears. Brittany suspects they were trapped. That wouldn’t surprise me, either.
A few months later, Brittany’s health began to deteriorate. She felt dizzy and fatigued; she struggled to walk. At the hospital, a wild thought rushed through her aching head: that, although glioblastoma is not hereditary, she had contracted the same disease that felled her brother. She didn’t fear death itself, but she was terrified by the thought of leaving behind her four children. The next day, she received her diagnosis: an aggressive form of multiple sclerosis.Another person might have grieved.Brittany, though, had expected incurable cancer. “I was so relieved,” she said. “I don’t think I even cried once. Like, whatever, I’ll get over it.”She threw herself into exercise and literature; although she occasionally requires a cane, her life has continued mostly unaltered.
The modest scope of her world has in some ways been a comfort. “Once upon a time, I was going to get my PhD, and both my husband and I were going to be college professors, intellectuals,” she said wistfully. They’d dreamt of spending their lives in a quaint college town, or maybe a big city. Instead, they’d returned to Cuba, where she’d become a substitute teacher and run summer sports-and-crafts programs and bumped into high school acquaintances at the only grocery store. First her brother’s disease had narrowed her universe, then her own had constricted it further. Her dreams deferred, she’d found pleasure in quiet, lovely sources: her nature journal, her chickens, the grackle nest on her property. Taking a cue from nature, she had simplified, and she was happy for it.
What’s more, beavers had reentered her orbit. Walking the creek behind her house one day in 2019, she came across a fresh dam and the whittled sticks that are Castor canadensis’s calling cards. Her heart sang. This new colony wasn’t as cooperative as the cemetery beavers, she discovered; she’s only seen one beaver so far. Still, she visits the stream often. “Especially since the quarantine, I find solace in spending time there,” she wrote in her first email to me.
Brittany and I spoke in late May,amidst an unprecedented societal lockdown. All over the country, people were adjusting to smaller, quieter lives, as Brittany had, and escaping their deepening depressions through nature, as Brittany once did. Gardening was ascendant; so was birdwatching. We were all trying to connect with forces deeper and simpler, to commune with creatures blessedly detached from a world that we’d ruined. That, in the end, was what Brittany loved most about beavers: “They’re so unaware,” she said, “of the shit that we go through.”
