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Mathematicians create ‘model of everything’, from gut microbes to climate change

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Team led by Yau Shing-Tung say their model can unveil ‘hidden patterns in complex systems’ in the body, society and the environment.

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King Charles has appointed a homeopath. Why do the elite put their faith in snake oil? | Martha Gill

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The aristocracy and celebrities are in thrall to medical quackery that while useless can be far from harmless

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Theme of Knowledge and Technology

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Bluetooth Auracast explained: 3 big reasons to upgrade your wireless headphones

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Audio is about to get friendlier and more inclusive – thanks, Auracast!

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Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o on What It Means To Be Kenyan

Explores identity and culture

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https://theconversation.com/halloween-candy-binges-can-overload-your-gut-microbiome-a-gut-doctor-explains-how-to-minimize-spooking-your-helpful-bacteria-240504

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Halloween candy binges can overload your gut microbiome – a gut doctor explains how to minimize spooking your helpful bacteria

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While most Halloween candies contain lots of sugar, some are better for your gut microbiome than others.

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The barcodes that appear on almost every product bought and sold in shops around the world were born 75 years ago on a beach in Miami (Credit: Alamy)

Few people think twice about the barcodes on their shopping, but in the 75 years since they were first dreamed up, they have helped save lives, gone into space and stoked fears of the Antichrist.
Lasers. That's what supermarket staff need, insisted Paul McEnroe. Scanners in the checkout and little pistol-shaped laser guns, too. Point, shoot, sell!

In 1969, it was an outlandish vision of the future: these lasers would scan weird little black-and-white markings on products that McEnroe and his colleagues at IBM had designed. It would speed up supermarket queues, he enthused. The solution would come to be known as the barcode.

At this point in history barcodes had never been used commercially - though the idea had been brewing for decades following a patent filed on 20 October 1949 by one of the engineers who was now part of McEnroe's team. The IBM engineers were trying to bring barcodes to life. They had a vision of the future where shoppers whizzed through the checkout with lasers scanning every item they wanted to purchase. But IBM's lawyers had a problem with the future.

"No way," they said, according to McEnroe, a now-retired engineer. Their fear was "laser suicide". What if people intentionally injured their eyes with the scanners and then sued IBM? What if supermarket staff went blind?

No, no, this was a mere half-milliwatt laser beam, McEnroe tried to explain. There was 12,000 times more energy in a 60-watt lightbulb. His pleas fell flat. And so he turned to Rhesus monkeys imported from Africa, though now he can't remember how many. "I think it was six," he says. "I couldn't swear to that." After tests at a nearby laboratory proved that exposure to the tiny laser did not harm the animals' eyes, the lawyers relented.

And that is how the scanning of barcodes became commonplace in supermarkets across the US, and ultimately the entire world.

Barcodes have always upset some people. To a fanatical few, they are nothing short of evil

In an unexpected twist, the laboratory used by McEnroe subsequently told him it would be sending him the monkeys. They were his problem now. "It was crazy," he recalls, laughing. "I found a zoo in North Carolina."

Alongside the monkeys, each human member of McEnroe's team at IBM also deserves credit for the Universal Product Code (UPC), as their version of the barcode became formally known. Among their number was Joe Woodland, the engineer who dreamed up the early concept behind barcodes decades earlier, after drawing lines in the sand on a beach. It was he and another engineer who made the application to patent the fundamental idea for barcodes back in October 1949.

Crucially, George Laurer and other members of the IBM team then took this pre-existing proposal for barcode-style markings and developed them into a neat rectangle of black, vertical lines corresponding to a number that could uniquely identify any supermarket item imaginable. From tins of soup to boxes of cereal or packets of spaghetti. The grocery industry formally adopted the UPC in 1973 and the first product bearing one was scanned at Marsh Supermarket in Ohio in 1974. From there, it conquered the planet.

Other kinds of barcode soon followed and the UPC also laid the foundations for so-called "2D barcodes" such as QR codes, which can encode even more information. But the history of these little black-and-white markings is far wilder and rockier than you would ever imagine.

You could even argue that it began with the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).

"I was scanning things for the CIA," explains McEnroe. "Great big maps." That was one of his first jobs at IBM, involving image scanners. As he explains in his book about the invention of the UPC barcode, this helped to prepare him for working on completely new, but related, technology that would revolutionise the retail industry.

McEnroe knew that checkout lines in stores would move much more quickly if staff could just scan products into a computer rather than having to read the prices stamped on each item and then manually process the sale. To be accepted, such a code-scanning system would have to work pretty much every time - and read the code correctly even if the product was pulled across the scanner at speeds of up to 100 inches per second (2.5m/s).

The IBM team set to work, drawing on the design patented by Woodland and his colleague - however, with an important difference. The original approach relied on reading the thickness of the black lines. One of the concepts they had proposed in the patent - a round, bulls-eye style barcode formed of concentric circles - had even been developed by a competing group. But this had proven difficult to print and even harder to fit neatly onto product packaging.

The IBM team worked out that it was easier to print vertical lines and base the scanning process not on measuring the thickness of those lines but rather the distance between the leading edge of one line and the leading edge of the line next to it. In other words, the space between the lines, which was more reflective and easier to pick up by the scanner. That way, it didn't matter if the label printer had too much ink and drew lines that were thicker than intended - the scan would still work, pretty much every time.

Barcodes are used to keep track of everything from livestock to the parcels we have delivered to our doors (Credit: Getty Images)

McEnroe stresses that the launch of UPC barcode technology was not without controversy. "Our first store didn't open," he recalls. There were people outside protesting the fact that prices would no longer be stamped on every product, merely on the shelves where products were placed in-store.

Some labour unions at the time felt - ultimately, correctly - that scanning technology threatened certain supermarket jobs. There were also concerns that barcodes could be used to obfuscate prices. McEnroe himself remembers how, in the past, shoppers sometimes searched for aging items in a supermarket since those ones might still have an older, lower price stamped on them. If barcodes took over, opportunities for such bargain-hunting would disappear.

These worries soon fizzled out. But barcodes have always upset some people.

To a fanatical few, they are nothing short of evil. In 2023, Jordan Frith, a professor of communication at Clemson University in South Carolina, published a book about the history of barcodes. During his research, he found a 1975 article in a publication called Gospel Call that suggested barcodes could be "the Mark of the Beast" - a reference to a biblical prophecy from the Book of Revelation about the end of the world. The New Testament passage in question refers to a beast - sometimes interpreted as the Antichrist - that forces every person to be marked on their right hand or forehead. In the prophecy, only those who accept such a mark are allowed to buy or sell.

The 1975 article suggested that, eventually, barcodes would be "laser tattooed" onto everybody's forehead or the back of their hand, ready for presentation at supermarket checkouts.

Although bizarre, the idea has proved surprisingly sticky. A 1982 book called The New Money System by evangelical writer Mary Stewart Relfe further popularised the supposed connection between UPC barcodes and the Mark of the Beast after she claimed the number 666 was "hidden" within the lines at either end and the middle of each barcode.

In fact, these "guard lines", as they are known, serve as a reference point to help the laser scanner pick out the start and end of each UPC sequence. Laurer in the IBM team, considered co-inventor of the UPC, later insisted there was nothing sinister about this and the resemblance to the pattern used to encode the number six was a coincidence.

It's kind of strange to imagine a bunch of grocery executives leading the way for the apocalypse - Jordan Frith

But the bizarre theory can still be found in certain corners of the Internet. And some even take extreme steps to avoid barcodes, including members of an orthodox Russian Christian group known as Old Believers. One such Old Believer, Agafia Lykov, who lives in an especially remote part of Siberia, told visiting journalists from Vice in 2013 that barcodes were "the stamp of the Antichrist". She added that if anyone gives her something, such as a packet of seeds, with a barcode on it, she takes the contents out and burns the packet.

Plus, in 2014, a Russian dairy company posted a statement on its website explaining why there was a red cross printed over the barcodes on its cartons of milk. Because, as is "well known", the statement read, barcodes are the Mark of the Beast. The statement has since been removed from the company's website.

McEnroe says he is aware of some of these strange beliefs around barcodes. "It's not something I would be prone to think," he says, rather diplomatically. Frith makes another point: "It's kind of strange to imagine a bunch of grocery executives leading the way for the apocalypse."

And yet there is, arguably, something strangely dystopian about barcodes. For some, they have become symbols of capitalism in its coldest form. They also often turn up in chilling sequences in movies. In The Terminator, we learn that prisoners of killer robots in an apocalyptic future receive barcode markings on their arms for identification. "This is burned in by laser scan," time-travelling protagonist Kyle Reese explains to a terrified Sarah Connor. "Some of us were kept alive to work - loading bodies." The barcode marking, in this context, has echoes of the numbers tattooed on the arms of Nazi concentration camp prisoners during the Second World War.

Sometimes people do use barcodes malevolently. Especially when it comes to QR codes, which rather than using vertical lines consist of constellations of tiny black and white squares in a pattern that is readable by digital smartphone cameras.

And, in September, Lebanon-based armed group Hezbollah accused Israel of dropping leaflets containing a dangerous barcode, referred to in some reports as a QR code, that could "withdraw all information" from any device used to scan it. The BBC has not been able to verify these claims.

Barcodes have not only revolutionised shopping but also keeping track of drugs and samples in healthcare (Credit: Getty Images)

Despite some nefarious uses of barcodes, and outlandish claims that they represent the Mark of the Beast, these markings now underpin thousands of industrial and commercial processes all over the world. An estimated 10 billion barcodes are scanned globally, every day, according to GS1, the organisation that oversees UPC and QR code standards.

You might have noticed the barcodes and QR codes on the packaging of items you receive in the post, for example. A single packet can be scanned many times on its journey from warehouse to you, says Frith. And because barcodes allow retailers to keep track of huge product inventories, that means these businesses can operate giant stores with relatively few staff. "You wouldn't have these superstores or anything like that without barcodes," says Frith. "It's changed the physical shape of retail."

Erin Temmen, an account manager at labelling firm Electronic Imaging Materials, agrees with this assessment. Her company, like some others in the industry, produce barcode labels that will work in practically any environment. This includes cold-resistant labels that won't fall off equipment filled with liquid nitrogen, for example. And chemical-resistant labels that will retain their barcode even if they get splashed with nasty substances in a laboratory. The firm also produces extra reflective barcode labels. "That increases the scan distance," says Temmen. It makes it easier for hurried workers to scan the code at a distance of up to 45ft (14m), making it detectable even if the barcode is on an item placed high on a shelf, for example.

The lines on a barcode work as a sort of visual morse code to signify different digits that are allocated to companies and items (Credit: BBC)

Back on Earth, it's possible that barcodes have saved lives. Hospitals use barcoding systems to track blood samples, drugs and medical devices such as hip replacements. The UK's National Health Service (NHS) has a Scan4Safety programme, to promote the use of barcodes for tracking such things. Machine-assisted identification can help staff ensure clinicians administer the correct drug to the correct patient, for example.

According to a report on Scan4Safety, the introduction of this technology has freed up 140,000 hours of staff time for patient care that would otherwise have been spent performing administrative tasks and inventory checks. It claims barcode scanning has also saved the health service millions of pounds.

"I speak with clinicians and members of staff in hospitals responsible for managing inventory - they all report benefits," says Valentina Lichtner, a senior lecturer of digital health and decision making at Leeds University Business School. She is currently researching the impact of barcode tracking systems in healthcare settings.

None of this would have been possible without Woodland's lines in the sand

And in a world where barcodes are pretty much everywhere, it's possible to design interesting games and experiences around them. One of the most inventive examples was Skannerz, an early 2000s handheld video game that had an integrated a barcode scanner into the device. Players were required to scan random barcodes on groceries, for example, until they found a code that happened to trigger the "capture" of an alien monster in the game - something that has strong echoes of the Pokemon games. Other games - including Japan's Barcode Battler - have also relied on getting players to scan barcodes as part of the "fun".

None of this would have been possible without Woodland's lines in the sand and the work of McEnroe and his team at IBM. Currently, there is a push - called Sunrise 2027 - to get retailers to adopt QR-style codes, over the older, vertical line-based designs. This would allow them to encode more information - such as use-by-dates on food packaging or instructions for how to use a certain cleaning product. But Frith says he thinks the traditional barcode will likely stick around for a long time to come. It is a deceptively simple technology that has, he says, impacted countless industries.

And yet, despite being everywhere, most people wouldn't give barcodes a second thought. "The biggest testament to their success," says Frith, "is that we never think about them."

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Few people think twice about barcodes, but in the 75 years since they were first dreamed up, they have helped save lives, gone into space and stoked fears of the Antichrist.

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When Steamboat goes WHOOSH, scientists look for answers

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What triggers geysers to go off is still not well understood. A new paper shows that one small earthquake likely triggered an eruption of the world’s tallest active geyser, Steamboat.

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AI, perspective, what is art?

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ChatGPT and the movie ‘Her’ are just the latest example of the ‘sci-fi feedback loop’

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Science fiction and technological innovation feed off each other in an ongoing back-and-forth that can play out over decades.

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Machine learning is helping medicine advance

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Blood samples of patients infected with a parasitic worm that causes schistosomiasis contain hidden information that marks different stages of the disease. In our recently published research, our team used machine learning to uncover that hidden information and improve early detection and diagnosis of infection.

The parasite that causes schistosomiasis completes its life cycle in two hosts - first in snails and then in mammals such as people, dogs and mice. Freshwater worm eggs enter human hosts through the skin and circulate throughout the body, damaging multiple organs, including the liver, intestine, bladder and urethra. When these larvae reach blood vessels connecting the intestines to the liver, they mature into adult worms. They then release eggs that are excreted when the infected person defecates, continuing the transmission cycle.

Since diagnosis currently relies on detecting eggs in feces, doctors usually miss the early stages of infection. By the time eggs are detected, patients have already reached an advanced stage of the disease. Because diagnosis rates are poor, public health officials typically mass-administer the drug praziquantel to populations in affected regions. However, praziquantel cannot clear juvenile worms in early stages of infection, nor can it prevent reinfection.

Our study provides a clear path forward to improving early detection and diagnosis by identifying the hidden information in blood that signals active, early stage infection.

Your body responds to a schistosomiasis infection by mounting an immune response involving several types of immune cells, as well as antibodies specifically targeting molecules secreted by or present on the worm and eggs. Our study introduces two ways to screen for certain characteristics of antibodies that signal early infection.

The first is an assay that captures a quantitative and qualitative profile of immune response, including various classes of antibodies and characteristics that dictate how they communicate with other immune cells. This allowed us to identify specific facets of the immune response that distinguish uninfected patients from patients with early and late-stage disease.

Second, we developed a new machine learning approach that analyzes antibodies to identify latent characteristics of the immune response linked to disease stage and severity. We trained the model on immune profile data from infected and uninfected patients and tested the model on data that wasn't used for training and data from a different geographical location. We identified not only biomarkers for the disease but also the potential mechanism that underlies infection.

Why it matters

Schistosomiasis is a neglected tropical disease that affects over 200 million people worldwide, causing 280,000 deaths annually. Early diagnosis can improve treatment effectiveness and prevent severe disease.

In addition, unlike many machine learning methods that are black boxes, our approach is also interpretable. This means it can provide insights into why and how the disease develops beyond simply identifying markers of disease, guiding future strategies for early diagnosis and treatment.

What still isn't known

The schistosomiasis infection signatures we identified remain stable across two geographical regions across two continents. Future research could explore how well these biomarkers apply to additional populations.

Further, our work identifies a potential mechanism behind disease progression. We found that a particular immune response against a specific protein on the surface of the worm signals an intermediate stage of infection. Understanding how the immune system responds to this understudied antigen could improve diagnosis and treatment.

What's next

Besides improving our understanding of how the immune system responds to different stages of infection, our findings identify key antigens that could pave the way for designing cost-effective and efficient approaches to diagnosis and treatments. Our next steps will include actually deploying these strategies in the field for early detection and management of disease.
The Research Brief is a short take about interesting academic work.

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Tracking vampire worms with machine learning − using AI to diagnose schistosomiasis before the parasites causing it hatch in your blood

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Schistosomiasis is a neglected tropical disease that triggers specific immune responses in the body. Identifying those hidden immune signatures can help improve detection and treatment.

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Some people love to scare themselves in an already scary world − here’s the psychology of why

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Scary movies and haunted houses can actually be a coping mechanism that helps you survive.

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Wild animals can experience trauma and adversity too

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Psychologists know that childhood trauma, or the experience of harmful or adverse events, can have lasting repercussions on the health and well-being of people well into adulthood. But while the consequences of early adversity have been well researched in humans, people aren't the only ones who can experience adversity.

If you have a rescue dog, you probably have witnessed how the abuse or neglect it may have experienced earlier in life now influence its behavior - these pets tend to be more skittish or reactive. Wild animals also experience adversity. Although their negative experiences are easy to dismiss as part of life in the wild, they still have lifelong repercussions - just like traumatic events in people and pets.

As behavioral ecologists, we are interested in how adverse experiences early in life can affect animals' behavior, including the kinds of decisions they make and the way they interact with the world around them. In other words, we want to see how these experience affect the way they behave and survive in the wild.

Many studies in humans and other animals have shown the importance of early life experiences in shaping how individuals develop. But researchers know less about how multiple, different instances of adversity or stressors can accumulate within the body and what their overall impact is on an animal's well-being.

Wild populations face many kinds of stressors. They compete for food, risk getting eaten by a predator, suffer illness and must contend with extreme weather conditions. And as if life in the wild wasn't hard enough, humans are now adding additional stressors such as chemical, light and sound pollution, as well as habitat destruction.

Given the widespread loss of biodiversity, understanding how animals react to and are harmed by these stressors can help conservation groups better protect them. But accounting for such a diversity of stressors is no easy feat. To address this need and demonstrate the cumulative impact of multiple stressors, our research team decided to develop an index for wild animals based on psychological research on human childhood trauma.

A cumulative adversity index

Developmental psychologists began to develop what psychologists now call the adverse childhood experiences score, which describes the amount of adversity a person experienced as a child. Briefly, this index adds up all the adverse events - including forms of neglect, abuse or other household dysfunction - an individual experienced during childhood into a single cumulative score.

This score can then be used to predict later-life health risks such as chronic health conditions, mental illness or even economic status. This approach has revolutionized many human health intervention programs by identifying at-risk children and adults, which allows for more targeted interventions and preventive efforts.

So, what about wild animals? Can we use a similar type of score or index to predict negative survival outcomes and identify at-risk individuals and populations?

These are the questions we were interested in answering in our latest research paper. We developed a framework on how to create a cumulative adversity index - similar to the adverse childhood experiences score, but for populations of wild animals. We then used this index to gain insights about the survival and longevity of yellow-bellied marmots. In other words, we wanted to see whether we could use this index to estimate how long a marmot would live.

A marmot case study

Yellow-bellied marmots are a large ground squirrel closely related to groundhogs. Our research group has been studying these marmots in Colorado at the Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory since 1962.

Yellow-bellied marmots are an excellent study system because they are diurnal, or active during the day, and they have an address. They live in burrows scattered across a small, defined geographical area called a colony. The size of the colony and the number of individuals that reside within varies greatly from year to year, but they are normally composed of matrilines, which means related females tend to remain within the natal colony, while male relatives move away to find a new colony.

Yellow-bellied marmots hibernate for most of the year, but they become active between April and September. During this active period, we observe each colony daily and regularly trap each individual in the population - that's over 200 unique individuals just in 2023. We then mark their backs with a distinct symbol and give them uniquely numbered ear tags so they can be later identified.

Although they can live up to 15 years, we have detailed information about the life experiences of individual marmots spanning almost 30 generations. They were the perfect test population for our cumulative adversity index.

Among the sources of adversity, we included ecological measures such as a late spring, a summer drought and high predator presence. We also included parental measures such as having an underweight or stressed mother, being born or weaned late, and losing their mother. The model also included demographic measures such as being born in a large litter or having many male siblings.

Importantly, we looked only at females, since they are the ones who tend to stay home. Therefore, some of the adversities listed are only applicable to females. For example, females born in litters with many males become masculinized, likely from the high testosterone levels in the mother's uterus. The females behave more like males, but this also reduces their life span and reproductive output. Therefore, having many male siblings is harmful to females, but maybe not to males.

So, does our index, or the number of adverse events a marmot experienced early on, explain differences in marmot survival? We found that, yes, it does.

Experiencing even just one adversity event before age 2 nearly halved an adult marmot's odds of survival, regardless of the type of adversity they experienced. This is the first record of lasting negative consequences from losing a mother in this species.

So what?

Our study isn't the only one of its kind. A few other studies have used an index similar to the human adverse childhood experiences score with wild primates and hyenas, with largely similar results. We are interested in broadening this framework so that other researchers can adopt it for the species they study.

A better understanding of how animals can or cannot cope with multiple sources of adversity can inform wildlife conservation and management practices. For example, an index like ours could help identify at-risk populations that require a more immediate conservation action.

Instead of tackling the one stressor that seems to have the greatest effect on a species, this approach could help managers consider how best to reduce the total number of stressors a species experiences.

For example, changing weather patterns driven by global heating trends may create new stressors that a wildlife manager can't address. But it might be possible to reduce how many times these animals have to interact with people during key times of the year by closing trails, or providing extra food to replace the food they lose from harsh weather.

While this index is still in early development, it could one day help researchers ask new questions about how animals adapt to stress in the wild.

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Wild animals can experience trauma and adversity too − as ecologists, we came up with an index to track how it affects them

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New research finds that marmots who experience adversity early in life have a lesser chance of survival.

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Atmospheric rivers - those long, narrow bands of water vapor in the sky that bring heavy rain and storms to the U.S. West Coast and many other regions - are shifting toward higher latitudes, and that's changing weather patterns around the world.

The shift is worsening droughts in some regions, intensifying flooding in others, and putting water resources that many communities rely on at risk. When atmospheric rivers reach far northward into the Arctic, they can also melt sea ice, affecting the global climate.

In a new study published in Science Advances, University of California, Santa Barbara, climate scientist Qinghua Ding and I show that atmospheric rivers have shifted about 6 to 10 degrees toward the two poles over the past four decades.

Atmospheric rivers on the move

Atmospheric rivers aren't just a U.S West Coast thing. They form in many parts of the world and provide over half of the mean annual runoff in these regions, including the U.S. Southeast coasts and West Coast, Southeast Asia, New Zealand, northern Spain, Portugal, the United Kingdom and south-central Chile.

California relies on atmospheric rivers for up to 50% of its yearly rainfall. A series of winter atmospheric rivers there can bring enough rain and snow to end a drought, as parts of the region saw in 2023.

Atmospheric rivers occur all over the world, as this animation of global satellite data from February 2017 shows. NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center Scientific Visualization Studio

While atmospheric rivers share a similar origin - moisture supply from the tropics - atmospheric instability of the jet stream allows them to curve poleward in different ways. No two atmospheric rivers are exactly alike.

What particularly interests climate scientists, including us, is the collective behavior of atmospheric rivers. Atmospheric rivers are commonly seen in the extratropics, a region between the latitudes of 30 and 50 degrees in both hemispheres that includes most of the continental U.S., southern Australia and Chile.

Our study shows that atmospheric rivers have been shifting poleward over the past four decades. In both hemispheres, activity has increased along 50 degrees north and 50 degrees south, while it has decreased along 30 degrees north and 30 degrees south since 1979. In North America, that means more atmospheric rivers drenching British Columbia and Alaska.

A global chain reaction

One main reason for this shift is changes in sea surface temperatures in the eastern tropical Pacific. Since 2000, waters in the eastern tropical Pacific have had a cooling tendency, which affects atmospheric circulation worldwide. This cooling, often associated with La Niña conditions, pushes atmospheric rivers toward the poles.

The poleward movement of atmospheric rivers can be explained as a chain of interconnected processes.

During La Niña conditions, when sea surface temperatures cool in the eastern tropical Pacific, the Walker circulation - giant loops of air that affect precipitation as they rise and fall over different parts of the tropics - strengthens over the western Pacific. This stronger circulation causes the tropical rainfall belt to expand. The expanded tropical rainfall, combined with changes in atmospheric eddy patterns, results in high-pressure anomalies and wind patterns that steer atmospheric rivers farther poleward.

Conversely, during El Niño conditions, with warmer sea surface temperatures, the mechanism operates in the opposite direction, shifting atmospheric rivers so they don't travel as far from the equator.

The shifts raise important questions about how climate models predict future changes in atmospheric rivers. Current models might underestimate natural variability, such as changes in the tropical Pacific, which can significantly affect atmospheric rivers. Understanding this connection can help forecasters make better predictions about future rainfall patterns and water availability.

Why does this poleward shift matter?

A shift in atmospheric rivers can have big effects on local climates.

In the subtropics, where atmospheric rivers are becoming less common, the result could be longer droughts and less water. Many areas, such as California and southern Brazil, depend on atmospheric rivers for rainfall to fill reservoirs and support farming. Without this moisture, these areas could face more water shortages, putting stress on communities, farms and ecosystems.

In higher latitudes, atmospheric rivers moving poleward could lead to more extreme rainfall, flooding and landslides in places such as the U.S. Pacific Northwest, Europe, and even in polar regions.

In the Arctic, more atmospheric rivers could speed up sea ice melting, adding to global warming and affecting animals that rely on the ice. An earlier study I was involved in found that the trend in summertime atmospheric river activity may contribute 36% of the increasing trend in summer moisture over the entire Arctic since 1979.

What it means for the future

So far, the shifts we have seen still mainly reflect changes due to natural processes, but human-induced global warming also plays a role. Global warming is expected to increase the overall frequency and intensity of atmospheric rivers because a warmer atmosphere can hold more moisture.

How that might change as the planet continues to warm is less clear. Predicting future changes remains uncertain due largely to the difficulty in predicting the natural swings between El Niño and La Niña, which play an important role in atmospheric river shifts.

As the world gets warmer, atmospheric rivers - and the critical rains they bring - will keep changing course. We need to understand and adapt to these changes so communities can keep thriving in a changing climate.

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Atmospheric rivers are shifting poleward, reshaping global weather patterns

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These powerful 'rivers in the sky' provide a huge share of annual precipitation in many regions, including California. They can also melt sea ice, with global climate implications.

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Science AOK--Why had scientists predicted fewer discoveries over time? Why were they wrong?

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Millions of scientific papers are published globally every year. These papers in science, technology, engineering, mathematics and medicine present discoveries that range from the mundane to the profound.

Since 1900, the number of published scientific articles has doubled about every 10 to 15 years; since 1980, about 8% to 9% annually. This acceleration reflects the immense and ever-growing scope of research across countless topics, from the farthest reaches of the cosmos to the intricacies of life on Earth and human nature.

Yet, this extraordinary expansion was once thought to be unsustainable. In his influential 1963 book, "Little Science, Big Science... And Beyond," the founder of scientometrics - or data informetrics related to scientific publications - Derek de Solla Price famously predicted limits to scientific growth.

He warned that the world would soon deplete its resources and talent pool for research. He imagined this would lead to a decline in new discoveries and potential crises in medicine, technology and the economy. At the time, scholars widely accepted his prediction of an impending slowdown in scientific progress.

Faulty predictions

In fact, science has spectacularly defied Price's dire forecast. Instead of stagnation, the world now experiences " global mega-science " - a vast, ever-growing network of scientific discovery. This explosion of scientific production made Price's prediction of collapse perhaps the most stunningly incorrect forecast in the study of science.

Unfortunately, Price died in 1983, too early to realize his mistake.

So, what explains the world's sustained and dramatically increasing capacity for scientific research?

We are sociologists who study higher education and science. Our new book, " Global Mega-Science: Universities, Research Collaborations, and Knowledge Production," published on the 60th anniversary of Price's fateful prediction, offers explanations for this rapid and sustained scientific growth. It traces the history of scientific discovery globally.

Factors such as economic growth, warfare, space races and geopolitical competition have undoubtedly spurred research capacity. But these factors alone cannot account for the immense scale of today's scientific enterprise.

The education revolution: Science's secret engine

In many ways, the world's scientific capacity has been built upon the educational aspirations of young adults pursuing higher education.

Over the past 125 years, increasing demand for and access to higher education has sparked a global education revolution. Now, more than two-fifths of the world's young people ages 19-23, although with huge regional differences, are enrolled in higher education. This revolution is the engine driving scientific research capacity.

Today, more than 38,000 universities and other higher-education institutions worldwide play a crucial role in scientific discovery. The educational mission, both publicly and privately funded, subsidizes the research mission, with a big part of students' tuition money going toward supporting faculty.

These faculty scientists balance their teaching with conducting extensive research. University-based scientists contribute 80% to 90% of the discoveries published each year in millions of papers.

External research funding is still essential for specialized equipment, supplies and additional support for research time. But the day-to-day research capacity of universities, especially academics working in teams, forms the foundation of global scientific progress.

Even the most generous national science and commercial research and development budgets cannot fully sustain the basic infrastructure and staffing needed for ongoing scientific discovery.

Likewise, government labs and independent research institutes, such as the U.S. National Institutes of Health or Germany's Max Planck Institutes, could not replace the production capacity that universities provide.

Collaboration benefits science and society

The past few decades have also seen a surge in global scientific collaborations. These arrangements leverage diverse talent from around the world to enhance the quality of research.

International collaborations have led to millions of co-authored papers. International research partnerships were relatively rare before 1980, accounting for just over 7,000 papers, or about 2% of the global output that year. But by 2010 that number had surged to 440,000 papers, meaning 22% of the world's scientific publications resulted from international collaborations.

This growth, building on the "collaboration dividend," continues today and has been shown to produce the highest-impact research.

Universities tend to share academic goals with other universities and have wide networks and a culture of openness, which makes these collaborations relatively easy.

Today, universities also play a key role in international supercollaborations involving teams of hundreds or even thousands of scientists. In these huge collaborations, researchers can tackle major questions they wouldn't be able to in smaller groups with fewer resources.

Supercollaborations have facilitated breakthroughs in understanding the intricate physics of the universe and the synthesis of evolution and genetics that scientists in a single country could never achieve alone.

The role of global hubs

Hubs made up of universities from around the world have made scientific research thoroughly global. The first of these global hubs, consisting of dozens of North American research universities, began in the 1970s. They expanded to Europe in the 1980s and most recently to Southeast Asia.

These regional hubs and alliances of universities link scientists from hundreds of universities to pursue collaborative research projects.

Scientists at these universities have often transcended geopolitical boundaries, with Iranian researchers publishing papers with Americans, Germans collaborating with Russians and Ukrainians, and Chinese scientists working with their Japanese and Korean counterparts.

The COVID-19 pandemic clearly demonstrated the immense scale of international collaboration in global megascience. Within just six months of the start of the pandemic, the world's scientists had already published 23,000 scientific studies on the virus. These studies contributed to the rapid development of effective vaccines.

With universities' expanding global networks, the collaborations can spread through key research hubs to every part of the world.

Is global megascience sustainable?

But despite the impressive growth of scientific output, this brand of highly collaborative and transnational megascience does face challenges.

On the one hand, birthrates in many countries that produce a lot of science are declining. On the other, many youth around the world, particularly those in low-income countries, have less access to higher education, although there is some recent progress in the Global South.

Sustaining these global collaborations and this high rate of scientific output will mean expanding access to higher education. That's because the funds from higher education subsidize research costs, and higher education trains the next generation of scientists.

De Solla Price couldn't have predicted how integral universities would be in driving global science. For better or worse, the future of scientific production is linked to the future of these institutions.

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Scientists around the world report millions of new discoveries every year − but this explosive research growth wasn't what experts predicted

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Don't be fooled by the image of a mad scientist isolated in his basement laboratory. Science is a collaborative endeavor, and international teams have contributed to a huge rise in scientific output.

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When Beyoncé's country album dropped earlier this year, she said, "This ain't a country album. This is a 'Beyoncé' album."

The pop diva made the distinction clear - that even if "Cowboy Carter" could be confided to a genre, it would still be a Beyoncé album. However, Beyoncé's individuality and genre-hopping skills have not bent the ear of the Country Music Awards. Despite the musician having the biggest country album of the year, she has been completely shut out from nominations for the 58th CMA Awards.

During "Cowboy Carter's" run, Beyoncé became the first Black woman to hit the No. 1 spot on the Billboard Country charts. It spent 22 weeks on the Billboard Top 200 and featured traditional white country stars like Dolly Parton and Willie Nelson, who both gave her more respect than the CMAs have managed to muster.

While "Cowboy Carter" smashed records and even catapulted Black country collaborators like Shaboozey, who has been nominated for best new artist and single of the year for the song "A Bar Song (Tipsey)," the CMAs still did not nominate the industry veteran and pop music shaper.

Unfortunately, this rejection from the traditional country music industry is one Beyoncé is familiar with. When she released "Texas Hold 'Em" earlier this year, a country music station in Oklahoma shut down a request from a fan to play the song. Only after an outcry from Beyoncé's BeyHive did the station relent and agree to play the new country single. According to the New York Times, the song itself faired well but "was given only limited promotion on country radio stations, where the industry often signals its preferences and choices."

However, the biggest rejection Beyoncé faced in the country music space was in 2016 after the performance of "Daddy Lessons" with the Chicks from the genre-bending album "Lemonade." The performance was eventually scrubbed from all of the CMAs' social media accounts after it was met with a cold reaction from audience members and conservative America.

That experience left a lasting impression on the musician - so she created "Cowboy Carter." Before the release of the album, Beyoncé said in a statement that "Cowboy Carter" was "born out of an experience that I had years ago where I did not feel welcomed . . . and it was very clear that I wasn't. But, because of that experience, I did a deeper dive into the history of country music and studied our rich musical archive."

In her album opener, "American Requiem," Beyoncé sang about this experience of alienation from the country world. She sang, "Used to say I spoke, 'Too country'/And the rejection came, said 'I wasn't country 'nough.'"

Outside of the CMAs, fans and music critics await the 2024 Grammy Awards nominations where Beyoncé holds the historic title for most winning artist. However, the artist has been shut out of winning album of the year four times, including for her albums "Lemonade" and "Renaissance."

The singer's husband and rapper, Jay-Z called out the Grammys this year for its snub of Beyoncé in 2023 saying, "I don't want to embarrass this young lady, but she has more Grammys than anyone and never won album of the year. So even by your own metrics, that doesn't work."

In the song "Sweet Honey Buckin," Beyoncé mentioned the snub, singing "A-O-T-Y, I ain't win (Let's go) / I ain't stung by them / Take that s**t on the chin / Come back and f**k up the pen."

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Beyoncé's CMA snub comes as no surprise, but it's still upsetting

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"Cowboy Carter" received zero nominations even after hitting No. 1 on Billboard's country album charts.

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The 2019 MTV Video Music Awards aired on Monday, August 26, and featured performances by Lizzo, Missy Elliott, Normani, Taylor Swift, and Lil Nas X, among others. Together with Billy Ray Cyrus, Lil Nas X was one of the artists to receive the most nominations heading into the night; the pair picked up eight total nominations for their collaboration on "Old Town Road": video of the year, song of the year, best new artist, best collaboration, best hip hop, best direction, best editing, and best art direction. Ultimately, they took home the award for song of the year.

But the road to success for the ode to the cowboy life, released in December 2018, hasn't always been a smooth ride. A number of factors have contributed to Lil Nas X's popularity, particularly the debate over whether "Old Town Road" should be classified as country music. Earlier this year,Billboard removed "Old Town Road" from its country chart, which boosted the rapper's profile to a wider audience while fueling a debate about what defines country music and who gets to decide. But even before Billboard stepped in, Lil Nas X had found fans through his popular meme-filled Twitter presence and a fast-growing TikTok meme dubbed the " Yee Haw Challenge " that centered on the song.

"Old Town Road" debuted in the 19th spot on the March 16 edition of Billboard's Hot Country Songs chart. But the following week it was gone - having been moved to the Hot Rap Songs chart, where it entered at No. 24.

"Upon further review, it was determined that 'Old Town Road' by Lil Nas X does not currently merit inclusion on Billboard's country charts," a Billboard representative told Rolling Stone, which reported on the reclassification on March 26. "When determining genres, a few factors are examined, but first and foremost is musical composition. While 'Old Town Road' incorporates references to country and cowboy imagery, it does not embrace enough elements of today's country music to chart in its current version."

Vox's Allegra Frank wrote:

The backlash was immediate, as many people criticized Billboard for feeding rigid ideas about who or what qualifies as country enough and argued that Lil Nas X's race played a part in the song's reclassification. Namely, the fact that Lil Nas X is a black teenager from Atlanta and country is a predominantly white genre did not go unnoticed.

"Old Town Road" eventually rose to No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 - on the rapper's birthday, no less. The song would go on to become the Billboard Hot 100's longest-running No. 1 ever.But the debate itself represents a deep divide within country music.

On this episode of Today, Explained, Vox Culture Editor Allegra Frank chronicles Lil Nas X's challenges with the charts and Charlie Harding, co-host of the Switched on Pop podcast, attempts to figure out what counts as country.

You can listen to Today, Explained wherever you get your podcasts, including: Apple Podcasts| Google Podcasts | Spotify | Stitcher | ART19

Below, we've shared a lightly edited transcript of Allegra Frank and Charlie Harding's April 9, 2019, conversation with Today, Explained host Sean Rameswaram.

Sean Rameswaram

Okay, so there's this song. It's called "Old Town Road." It's by a guy named Lil Nas X. No relation to Nasty Nas from NYC. This song hit No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 today [April 9, 2019]. It is the most popular song in America. And it's also the most controversial.

Allegra Frank

So "Old Town Road" is in the center of an interesting conversation now about who and what gets to count as country music. But as country continues to absorb other genres - like there's country rap, a lot of country music artists are collaborating with pop stars - the traditionalists, the purists who think of country as the "Old Town Road" literally, they start to question who gets to be in it.

Sean Rameswaram

So Allegra, before we get into the song - who is this guy? Who is Lil Nas X?

Allegra Frank

He is a 20-year-old rapper from Atlanta. Technically his birth name is Montero Hill, but he has been calling himself "Lil Nas X" for several years now. And last year he joined SoundCloud, as many people do. And by the end of the year in December he released a song called "Old Town Road."

He bought a beat that had this sort of country-sounding instrumental to it. And he said he was living at home feeling very lonely, feeling like a lonely cowboy, and he decided to pair that feeling with this sort of twangy beat that he bought. So "Old Town Road" starts off very much as this deep-voiced ode to the simple life on the dirt road path with your horse. And then it breaks into what he calls "country trap."

Sean Rameswaram

So he uploads the song to SoundCloud back in December. Why is it just making waves in recent weeks and even months?

Allegra Frank

He basically timed it well for this thing that's called the yee haw agenda."

Sean Rameswaram

The what? The yee haw agenda?!

Allegra Frank

The yee haw agenda. This woman, Bri Malandro, tweeted about how a lot of black artists are getting interested in sort of the country aesthetic. And the way that Lil Nas X factored into that is, while people were picking up on the good ol' cowboy/cowgirl aesthetic, his song was circulating on Twitter and he made it available for free on TikTok, which is this huge platform kind of akin to Vine where people can lip sync to songs and record themselves doing dance moves, and people who already were kind of feeling this kind of ironic cowboy vibe turned "Old Town Road" into the "Yee Haw Challenge." It became this new TikTok phenomenon where people would try and outdo each other dancing to "Old Town Road." So the way the song starts is, it's very like classic country, and then the beat drops.

Sean Rameswaram

And that's where all these videos get their comedy from, it's like what happens when the beat drops. Right?

Allegra Frank

Exactly. So people are kind of just like standing around and then they jump right timed to the beat dropping, and it cuts to them wearing cowboy outfits and doing like square dancing. Lil Nas X continues to argue on Twitter like, "Oh I'm so happy to see all these people making memes and listening to the song. But I'm serious about it - just because it can be funny and I'm funny doesn't mean it's a parody."

Sean Rameswaram

What happens after the song becomes such a huge meme on TikTok?

Allegra Frank

In mid-March the Billboard charts come out. And the song had become so much of a viral hit that it actually appeared on the Billboard charts; it appeared on the Hot Rap Hip Hop songs chart and the Hot Country Songs chart.

Sean Rameswaram

And this is because a song like "Old Town Road" is getting streamed a ton on places like Spotify and YouTube and SoundCloud and those streams now count a fair amount on Billboard, right?

Allegra Frank

Yes, exactly. That was exciting for a lot of people. I mean, we don't often see black artists on the country charts in general and we don't often see SoundCloud-born rap-adjacent songs charting so highly - especially ones that really are just circulated through memes and the internet.

Sean Rameswaram

Okay. So what happens next? The song is starting to chart and it's rising on Billboard. Where does it go from there?
Allegra Frank
Five staffers from Billboard released an article in the publication and the majority of them wrote it off as, "Oh, it's sort of a fluke hit, it's a joke." The following week it was gone from the country chart. It was on the Hot 100 and the rap chart. But "Old Town Road" was not on the country chart.

Sean Rameswaram

Where was it on the Billboard charts when it got removed?

Allegra Frank

It was only on the chart for one week. So when it debuted, it was already at No. 19.

Sean Rameswaram

Which is to suggest that it would have kept climbing had they not removed it?

Allegra Frank

Exactly.

Sean Rameswaram

How often does Billboard remove songs that are climbing up its charts?

Allegra Frank

Very rarely. I mean, people were starting to report on, "Hey, Billboard has quietly stricken 'Old Town Road' from the record."

Sean Rameswaram

What did Billboard say?

Allegra Frank

They said while it incorporates references to country and cowboy imagery it does not embrace enough elements of today's country music to chart in its current version.

Sean Rameswaram

How does Lil Nas respond to that?

Allegra Frank

He said he was extremely disappointed.

Sean Rameswaram

This is the point in this story where this becomes about something bigger than country trap and TikTok and fun internet memes because you've got a black artist in America who's charting in a very white music space and his song gets quietly removed by a very powerful, influential organization. How much of this is about race? Or how much does the conversation then shift to race?

Allegra Frank

Genius reached out and of course Billboard said, "Oh no, it has nothing to do with his race, it has everything to do with the song and the lack of country elements in it." It immediately set off conversation, especially in the black Twitter community. Country has often been very much protected. There's a big gatekeeping sort of vibe, and country music prevents black artists from really penetrating the scene. There are some exceptions.

Sean Rameswaram

Hootie!

Allegra Frank

Hootie! Yes, exactly. Darius Rucker. He's the big one of Hootie and the Blowfish fame. He sort of spawned off from that band into a solo career that has been very successful, but he has said, "Yes, I do receive hate mail from people who say you don't belong here, you're not real country, which essentially is people saying 'You don't look like us and you're not white.'" But he has been an exception in the genre.

Sean Rameswaram

But Lil Nas X clearly subscribes to the "If you can't beat 'em, join 'em" school of thought because late last week [on April 5, 2019] he drops a remix that changes the trajectory of this song. Again.

Allegra Frank

Lil Nas X has a huge Twitter following and the news spread so far out that people like "Achy Breaky Heart" sensation and father of Miley, Billy Ray Cyrus, publicly tweeted at Lil Nas X saying, "I think this is wrong, and I'm a fan of your song. And you're country, you're an outlaw just like me." Billy Ray Cyrus coming out so publicly with his support, Lil Nas X of course retweeted that. They talked on the DL and they announced that they actually went in the studio together to remix the song.

Sean Rameswaram

What does that mean for the song? Is it going to get back on the country charts?

Allegra Frank

That's sort of the question now. The only difference is Billy Ray Cyrus really just singing the main hook of the song and then singing a few more verses. It otherwise is the exact same song. But because there's a vaunted legend of country music, the question is, will Billboard consider this country now? Billboard has responded to that saying, "We're investigating the matter and we're paying attention to see if we should reinstate 'Old Town Road' onto the chart."

Sean Rameswaram

Our trip down the "Old Town Road" ain't over yet. Next, we're gonna try and figure out what even is country music anymore. Charlie Harding, you are one of the hosts of Vox's Switched on Pop Podcast, as well as a producer and songwriter yourself. A big part of the controversy over "Old Town Road" is about genre. How does one figure out the lines between country and pop and hip hop?

Charlie Harding

When I think about genre I typically think about three main components. There's a musical component, there's a commercial component, and there's a cultural component.

Sean Rameswaram

Let's start with the music. What should we be thinking about when we think about this song and how it fits into the musical genre of country or hip hop?

Charlie Harding

I feel like the controversy right now is, is this thing actually country? And so we have to define: What is country music? And if we look at the musical components, we can think about: What are the instruments that you use? What are the timbres, the twangs, the sounds, and what are the lyrical components?

Sean Rameswaram

Is "Old Town Road" a country song by those three metrics?
Charlie Harding
Well, let's take them one by one. So instrumentation in country music is going to have a lot of acoustic instruments, but traditionally we can hear maybe some banjo, maybe some mandolin, and here there's banjo. So instruments, check. Timber? That vocal twang that we expect in country music, it's in there - Lil Nas X has got a vocal twang, that real nasal sound. And when, of course, Billy Ray Cyrus has done the track you get that twang as well from someone who is a classic country artist.

Sean Rameswaram

He even says "gee-tar."

Charlie Harding

Exactly. And then finally, if we look at the lyrics, this is just through-and-through full of country music lyrical tropes. You got to be on a road. You gotta have a cowboy hat, right. You got to be wearing Wrangler jeans in this case, right.

Sean Rameswaram

You got to be kind of sad.

Charlie Harding

Yeah, totally. Lyrically, I think it has all of those essential components. When I hear that vocal twang, when I hear banjo, I'm like, "Yeah, this is a country song."

Sean Rameswaram

But how about the rest of it? How about that second metric you had: commercial?

Charlie Harding

When we look at the history of where genre in pop music comes from, we'll see that there are some not-so-pretty histories. The short of it is that what is now known as R&B - so, progenitor to hip hop - was at one point called "race music." It was specifically for people who were of a specific race, whereas country music was called "hillbilly music" for people of another race. And basically we had black and white music segregated along those lines with marketing definitions, so that labels would produce music for a specific racial audience. It was that explicit, and we live with that history today.

Sean Rameswaram

I guess that that sort of leads us into this conversation about the culture.

Charlie Harding

Absolutely. You know, Lil Nas X posted "Old Town Road" on SoundCloud. He actually in the metadata said it was a country song. So there's a question about who gets to be the gatekeeper of declaring what genre you are. Really, I think we're just seeing some casual or not-so-casual racism about who is and what isn't country. I think that this gets much more complicated when we actually look at the sounds of contemporary country music - which doesn't conform to that original classification of you have to have banjos and a certain sound or a certain twang, because there's lots of contemporary music which is actually equally pulling from hip hop sounds, trap beats, 808s, all this and that.

Sean Rameswaram

And this is from very conventional white country Nashville artists.

Charlie Harding

That's right. The song that everyone's pointing to is Florida Georgia Line's "Meant to Be" with Bebe Rexha. And when you go into the chorus, the thing is a trap song. It's got an 808 beat, it's got stuttering high-hats. The thing is a wild and successful crossover. I thought, "Wouldn't it be interesting if I just went down the country charts to see if there were other songs that were doing this, or is Bebe Rexha and Florida Georgia Line a one-off?" And I just found, over and over, all sorts of songs which didn't conform to the musical categories of country music.

I found Filmore's "Love That About You," which is another song which has a straight-ahead trap beat in it. I then went off and looked at Dan + Shay, and their song "All to Myself": doesn't really feature any standard country music instrumentation, and there's really no vocal twang to it. And so when things on the country charts are bleeding into other generic qualities musically, it definitely feels like it's not appropriate to call out Lil Nas X for having a country sound which includes trap beats and sort of saying, "Well, that's not country."

Sean Rameswaram

So what you're saying is there's already hip hop all over the country charts right now?

Charlie Harding

Hip hop is the dominant musical force everywhere, and it has wildly influenced country music as in other genres. I hear EDM in country music. I hear pop in country music. This is not old-school banjo, mandolin, that kind of upright bass sound from decades past. It is contemporary popular music with subtle, nuanced sounds that maybe make things sound country, and oftentimes it feels like it's more about gatekeeping than it is necessarily about the actual quality of sound.

Sean Rameswaram

But all the songs and artists you're talking about are white. And then this black teenager came along, who's a creature of the internet, and he just sort of exposed a whole world of hypocrisy.

Charlie Harding

Absolutely. And there is a history of country artists actually inviting black artists to perform with them. Louis Armstrong has performed with Jimmie Rodgers and they had a hit, "Blue Yodel No. 9." Glen Campbell invited Stevie Wonder to sing "Blowin' in the Wind." Willie Nelson worked with Snoop Dogg on a track called "My Medicine." There's all these examples of white artists bringing black artists into the country charts, which is accepted, and I think there's also examples of black artists making country music. Ray Charles' Modern Sounds in Country Music is one of the most essential country albums of all time, in which he really is demonstrating the historical crossover of these musics.

I mean, Sean, I played in a country band, I love country music. I just picked up the mandolin and I played in a country band with my buddy Nate, who I do Switched on Pop with. He was playing banjo. And I promise you nobody was concerned about whether or not we had, like, put in our time to become a country band. Whereas people are really concerned about Lil Nas X playing country music. I wonder why that is ...

Sean Rameswaram

You know, you hear so many stories about how streaming is killing the music industry, how Spotify is destroying album sales for artists, but is this "Old Town Road" story an example of Spotify and SoundCloud and YouTube streams being considered in this sort of bigger picture of success in the music industry being an overall good thing, because it's destroying some of these gatekeepers and some of these norms in the industry that were kind of garbage to begin with?

Charlie Harding

I think that this is the essential question about who gets to be a gatekeeper, and the institutions like Billboard might seem uneasy by the fact that there are other folks deciding whether or not something is or is not a certain genre. I went on Spotify today and I was scrolling through - just browsing in their search section - and the category " Country" was next to the category " Focus," which I think was maybe even below the category "Podcasts."

These are not mutually exclusive and completely exhaustive categories; there is a lot of overlap. And I think that today people listen as much by mood as they do by genre, upending an entire way of thinking about the importance of these generic categories. "Pump-Up" and " Chill " are equally as important as country or hip hop and how people might approach going to listen to music. It is changing the way things chart, where they end up. And there is some uneasy cultural negotiation that needs to be done in order to decide who gets to claim what kind of music they're making.

Sean Rameswaram

And in that regard, Lil Nas X is thus far the most unlikely hero of American culture in 2019.

Charlie Harding

Absolutely. We have to also point out how amazing it is that this thing which was a meme that was commentary on cowboy culture and black identity that became an immediate overnight thinkpiece which an aging country star then remixed. Like, this thing is entirely of our moment. This is not old country music of a rural community. This is the internet generation.

You can listen to Today, Explained wherever you get your podcasts, including: Apple Podcasts| Google Podcasts | Spotify | Stitcher | ART19

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How "Old Town Road" revealed a deep divide within country music

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The 2019 MTV Video Music Awards aired on Monday, August 26, and featured performances by Lizzo, Missy Elliott, Normani, Taylor Swift, and Lil Nas X, among others.

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Freudian psychology is based on the work of Austrian neurologist Sigmund Freud (1856-1939). He is considered the father of psychoanalysis and is largely credited with establishing the field of talk therapy. Today, psychoanalytic and psychodynamic approaches to therapy are the modalities that draw most heavily on Freudian principles. Freud also developed influential theories about subjects such as the unconscious mind, the sources of psychopathology, the significance of dreams.

What Is Freud Known For?

Freud is known for his wide-ranging theories on matters such as the unconscious, dreams, infantile sexuality, libido, repression, and transference -all of which continue to influence the field of psychology to varying degrees. Trained as a neurologist, Freud conceived of the mind as the desire-centered id, the morally driven superego, and the ego (or "the I") in between, contributed to a new understanding of human psychological development and the treatment of psychological disturbance.

Other concepts that are popularly associated with Freud today include that of revealing "Freudian slips" in speech and Freud's theory of the Oedipus complex, in which a child harbors an unconscious sexual attraction to an opposite-sex parent.

Freud argued that dreams were an important window into the unconscious mind and could be understood as the mind's way of satisfying desires that could not be satisfied in waking life. Elements of reality could be represented by a variety of dream symbols. He proposed ways of deciphering their meaning in his 1899 book The Interpretation of Dreams.

A "Freudian slip" is an instance of misspeaking-"we've had a few sexbacks," or "nice to beat you"-that supposedly reveals hidden thoughts or motives. Freud described such slips in his 1901 book, The Psychopathology of Everyday Life.

Freud proposed that boys have sexual feelings for their mother and desire to eliminate their father. (Oedipus is a mythical figure who kills his father and marries his mother, not knowing they are his parents.) There is no consensus among psychologists that there is a universal Oedipus complex that takes the form Freud described.

Freud described the libido as the mental energy of the human instincts to live and procreate. It was thought to express itself through physical means (including sexual gratification), but also through psychological means, as in the form of wish fulfillment in dreams.

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Freud and Psychotherapy

The form of therapy that Freud pioneered, called psychoanalysis, has played a foundational role in the practice of therapy in general. As a theorist and a clinician, he illustrated the potential power of talking and making observations about one's inner life in improving symptoms of mental illness. While later branches of psychotherapy-including contemporary psychoanalysis-differ from him on the details of theory and practice, they have nevertheless been influenced by Freud's work.

Having conducted his own self-analysis, Freud trained new psychoanalysts in part by analyzing them. Subsequently, psychoanalysts-in-training were analyzed by someone who had themselves been analyzed, in a chain leading back to Freud. This has been called a "training analysis."

Freud's Ideas Today

As psychology and psychotherapy evolved, the approach to therapy that Freud created slipped from prominence. Major ideas of his, such as his conceptualization of the unconscious, have been discounted by scientists as difficult or impossible to test empirically.

Nevertheless, psychologists continue to find wisdom and meaning in Freudian concepts, such as projection and other " defense mechanisms," and modern psychoanalytic therapists owe much to Freud's methods, as do therapists who employ psychodynamic approaches.

More than just providing knowledge about the sleeping mind, dream interpretation can also become a source of insight into other arenas of human symbolic behavior and expression.

After months of lockdown, quarantine, and retracting from the lives we led, we now reside in the ruins of repetition.

When you have a dream that feels uncanny, you have a special opportunity to expand your self-awareness and discover new spiritual insights about your life.

More than just providing knowledge about the sleeping mind, dream interpretation can also become a source of insight into other arenas of human symbolic behavior and expression.

After months of lockdown, quarantine, and retracting from the lives we led, we now reside in the ruins of repetition.

When you have a dream that feels uncanny, you have a special opportunity to expand your self-awareness and discover new spiritual insights about your life.

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Freudian psychology is based on the work of Austrian neurologist Sigmund Freud (1856-1939). He is considered the father of psychoanalysis and is largely credited with establishing the field of talk therapy. Today, psychoanalytic and psychodynamic approaches to therapy are the modalities that draw most heavily on Freudian principles.

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Ancient history is flush with unsolved mysteries, some of which, from lost burial sites to sunken cities, have captivated the public imagination for centuries.

"People are fascinated by origins, people are fascinated by mysteries," says Andrea M. Berlin, a professor of archeology at Boston University. "We're very curious about what we can't see, about what came before."

And though some mysteries will likely never be solved, others are being chipped away at with the help of new technologies. As Berlin points out, a present-day archeologist who finds a clay pellet may use an atomic reactor, among other tools, to deduce its chemical composition, whereas a 19th-century archeologist would have relied on a mere pickaxe and wheelbarrow.

"Every single new technology that has been made available to archeologists, beginning with carbon-14 dating in the 1950s, has radically pushed the field," Berlin says. "We can see deeper and smaller and finer, and so there are many more questions we can ask and answer."

She adds: "We have learned a lot about how sophisticated many ancient sites were."

In Berlin's experience, professional archeologists tend to eschew the role of popular sleuth, especially as it pertains to things like Noah's Ark and treasure-laden tombs. Nevertheless, she recognizes the sense of wonder such mysteries inspire.

"We're a present and future-oriented society these days," Berlin says, "so from my point of view, anyone who cares at all, even a little bit, about the past, that's great."

1. Thonis-Heracleion

An Egyptian port city on the Mediterranean Sea, Thonis-Heracleion served as a major trading hub prior to the founding of nearby Alexandria around 331 B.C. Mythical hero Heracles and Helen of Troy both supposedly spent time there. Around the second century B.C., however, the city center collapsed due to soil liquification, possibly triggered by earthquakes, tsunamis, or floods. Eventually, all of Thonis-Heracleion sank underwater, where it remained lost to time until being rediscovered in the early 2000s by marine archeologists. Since then, large statues, animal sarcophagi, temple ruins, pottery shards, jewelry, coins, and even 2,400-year-old fruit baskets have been pulled from the waves, thus shining new light on this real-life Atlantis.

2. Plain of Jars

Thousands of lichen-covered stone jars from the Iron Age, some standing close to 10 feet tall and weighing several tons, dot the mountainous landscape of northern Laos. Carved largely from sandstone and found in groups ranging from just one to 400, legend holds that giants used them as wine glasses. Many archeologists, on the other hand, believe they served as funerary urns, though much remains unknown about their purpose, about how they were moved into place, and about the civilization that produced them. Recent research dates at least some of the stone jars to as early as 1240 B.C., which would make them far older than the human remains buried nearby. Complicating matters is that many of the jars stand in fields of unexploded munitions, the vestige of a massive U.S. bombing campaign during the Vietnam War, and therefore cannot be safely studied.

3. Guanabara Bay

Acting on a tip from locals, controversial shipwreck explorer Robert Marx claimed in 1982 to have discovered a number of twin-handled Roman vases, known as amphoras, in Brazil's Guanabara Bay. According to Marx, the barnacle-covered amphoras provided proof that the Romans were the first Europeans in Brazil, having pre-dated the Portuguese by over 1,000 years. However, he was never able to fully explore the site, as the Brazilian government banned him from the country for alleged looting and halted underwater exploration altogether. Marx responded by accusing Brazil's Navy of dumping sediment on the amphoras so as not to have to re-write history. To this day, a Roman presence on Brazil's coast remains highly unproven.

4. Nazca Lines

Roughly 2,000 years ago, a pre-Inca civilization etched a series of enormous drawings into the dry coastal plain of Peru. Known as the Nazca Lines, these geoglyphs remained largely unknown until aircraft began flying over the area in the 1930s. To date, well over 1,000 designs have been located: Most are straight lines, stretching up to 30 miles, or geometric shapes, from trapezoids to spirals, while others depict animals and plants, including a spider, a hummingbird, a monkey, a whale, a two-headed snake, a dog, and a humanoid figure nicknamed "The Astronaut." As recently as 2022, 168 new geoglyphs were discovered, yet researchers still don't understand their purpose. One prominent hypothesis associates them with water rituals, though other guesses abound as well.

5. Paracas Candelabra

To the northwest of the Nazca Lines, carved into a hillside overlooking Peru's Pisco Bay, lies the Paracas Candelabra, another massive geoglyph that stretches some 600 feet from top to bottom. Though pottery found at the site has been dated to around 200 B.C., no one knows the age of the candelabra itself. Its raison d'être remains equally fuzzy. One theory holds that it served as a navigational tool for sailors, whereas another claims it depicted the creator god's trident.

6. Sacsayhuamán

Elsewhere in Peru, just outside Cuzco, stands the remains of the Sacsayhuamán fortress, which was painstakingly constructed by the Incas in the 1400s. Much like at Machu Picchu, Inca laborers somehow moved enormous rocks into place-some of which weighed 125 tons or more-before masons cut them, using only bronze and stone tools, and fitted them together without mortar. Though Spanish colonizers dismantled much of the site for building materials, Sacsayhuamán has remained structurally sound enough to withstand large earthquakes and other ravages of time.

For an ancient ruler, much is known about Cleopatra VII, the so-called last queen of Egypt, who famously consorted with both Julius Caesar and Mark Antony and later committed suicide in 30 B.C. following Antony's and her defeat at the Battle of Actium. Yet the location of Antony's and her tomb-the couple were purportedly buried together-remains a complete mystery. Some researchers believe it resided in Alexandria, her capital city and the one-time cultural center of the Mediterranean world, only to be lost when a tsunami swept through in 365 A.D. Others suspect elsewhere in the Nile Delta, possibly in a temple dedicated to Isis and Osiris, the gods with which Cleopatra and Antony respectively associated themselves. In addition to Cleopatra's, other legendary lost burial sites include those of Alexander the Great and Genghis Khan.

8. Voynich Manuscript

In 1912, rare book dealer Wilfrid Voynich acquired a medieval manuscript that he claimed had been housed in "an ancient castle in southern Europe." Written in an extinct language, or code, no one could recognize and filled with strange illustrations of fictitious plants and naked women, it has befuddled scholars ever since, including Alan Turing and the FBI, both of whom tried and failed to crack the case. Over the years, several people have professed to decipher it, but each time have been greeted with a massive chorus of doubts. Some suspect the whole thing is an elaborate hoax. Now housed at Yale University, the Voynich manuscript is available to the public for anyone interested in trying to solve the puzzle once and for all.

9. Yonaguni Monument

Off the coast of Japan's Yonaguni Island lies an underwater rock structure, at least 165 feet long and 65 feet wide, that resembles a manmade step pyramid. Discovered in the 1980s and now known as the Yonaguni Monument, it is believed by some researchers to be the ruins of an ancient civilization. Many other researchers, however, contend that "Japan's Atlantis" is nothing more than a curious natural phenomenon shaped by tectonic uplift and ocean currents.

10. Stonehenge

Construction of Stonehenge, one of the world's most iconic prehistoric landmarks, began some 5,000 years ago, before England even entered the Bronze Age. Well studied for centuries, most researchers agree it functioned as a burial site-and it's now known where the massive stones came from. Yet Stonehenge's other secrets remain stubbornly elusive, involving its possible religious, ceremonial, astronomical, and therapeutic significance.

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Despite the best efforts of amateur and professional archeologists, the ancient world has retained many of its secrets.

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PT #6

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14 biggest historical mysteries that will probably never be solved

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From the identity location of Cleopatra's tomb to the fate of the Ark of the Covenant, some historical mysteries may never be solved.

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PT #6

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This massive 780-foot (238 meters) crop circle appeared in 2001 in the remote area of Milk Hill in Wiltshire, England. The elaborate design is composed of 409 circles that form a pattern called a double, or six-sided, triskelion, which is a motif consisting of three interlocking spirals.

Credit: Handy Marks | public domain

Crop circles - strange patterns that appear mysteriously overnight in farmers' fields-provoke puzzlement, delight and intrigue among the press and public alike. The circles are mostly found in the United Kingdom, but have spread to dozens of countries around the world in past decades. The mystery has inspired countless books, blogs, fan groups, researchers (dubbed "cereologists") and even Hollywood films.

Despite having been studied for decades, the question remains: Who - or what - is making them?

Many people believe that crop circles have been reported for centuries, a claim repeated in many books and websites devoted to the mystery. Their primary piece of evidence is a woodcut from 1678 that appears to show a field of oat stalks laid out in a circle. Some take this to be a first-hand eyewitness account of a crop circle, but a little historical investigation shows otherwise.

A woodcut pamphlet that some claim represents an early crop circle.

The woodcut actually illustrates what in folklore is called a "mowing devil" legend, in which an English farmer told a worker with whom he was feuding that he "would rather pay the Devil himself" to cut his oat field than pay the fee demanded. The source of the harvesting is not unknown or mysterious; it is indeed Satan himself, who - complete with signature horns and a tail - can be seen in the woodcut holding a scythe.

Some claim that the first crop circles (though they were not called that at the time) appeared near the small town of Tully, Australia. In 1966, a farmer said he saw a flying saucer rise up from a swampy area and fly away; when he went to investigate he saw a roughly circular area of debris and apparently flattened reeds and grass, which he assumed had been made by the alien spacecraft (but which police investigators said was likely caused by a natural phenomena such as a dust devil or waterspout). Referred in the press as "flying saucer nests," this story is more a UFO report than a crop circle report.

As in the 1678 mowing devil legend, the case for it being linked to crop circles is especially weak when we consider that the impression or formation was not made in a crop of any kind but instead in ordinary grass. A round impression in a lawn or grassy area is not necessarily mysterious (as anyone with a kiddie pool in the back yard knows). Indeed, mysterious circles have appeared in grass throughout the world that are sometimes attributed to fairies but instead caused by disease.

In fact, the first real crop circles didn't appear until the 1970s, when simple circles began appearing in the English countryside. The number and complexity of the circles increased dramatically, reaching a peak in the 1980s and 1990s when increasingly elaborate circles were produced, including those illustrating complex mathematical equations.

In July 1996, one of the world's most complex and spectacular crop circles appeared in England, across a highway from the mysterious and world-famous Stonehenge monument in the Wiltshire countryside. It was astonishing fractal pattern called a Julia Set, and while some simple or rough circles might be explained away as the result of a strange weather phenomenon, this one unmistakably demonstrated intelligence. The only question was whether that intelligence was terrestrial or extra-terrestrial.

Making the design all the more mysterious, it was claimed that the circle appeared in less than an hour and during the daytime - which, if true, would be virtually impossible for hoaxers to accomplish. The circle became one of the most famous and important crop circles in history.

It was later revealed that the circle had in fact been made in about three hours (by three hoaxers) very early that morning. It simply hadn't been noticed until the following afternoon when spotted from an airplane overhead.

People inspect crop circles within a golden wheat field in Switzerland. The photo was taken on July 29, 2007.

Credit: Jabberocky public domain

Unlike other mysterious phenomenon such as psychic powers, ghosts, or Bigfoot, there is no doubt that crop circles are "real." The evidence that they exist is clear and overwhelming. The real question is instead what creates them - and there are ways to investigate that question.

We can look at both internal and external evidence to evaluate crop circles. Internal information includes the content and meaning of the designs (is there anything that indicates that any information contained in the "messages" is of extraterrestrial origin?), and external information, including the physical construction of the crop designs themselves (is there anything that indicates that the designs were created by anything other than humans?)

Crop circle enthusiasts have come up with many theories about what create the patterns, ranging from the plausible to the absurd. One explanation in vogue in the early 1980s was that the mysterious circle patterns were accidentally produced by the especially vigorous sexual activity of horny hedgehogs. Some people have suggested that the circles are somehow created by localized and precise wind patterns, or by scientifically undetectable Earth energy fields and meridians called ley lines.

Others, such as molecular biologist Horace Drew, suggest that the answer lies instead in time travel or alien life. He theorizes that the patterns could be made by human time travelers from the distant future to help them navigate our planet. Drew, working on the assumption that the designs are intended as messages, believes he has decoded crop circle symbols and that they contain messages such as "Believe," "There is good out there," "Beware the bearers of false gifts and their broken promises," and "We oppose deception" (all, presumably, in English).

However, these odd, pseudo-biblical messages undermine the credibility of the crop circles, or at least the meaning read into them. Of all the information that an extraterrestrial intelligence might choose to convey to humanity - ranging from how to contact them to engineering secrets of faster-than-light travel - these aliens chose to impart intentionally cryptic messages about false gifts, broken promises, and hope for mankind (along with what seems to be a reference to a popular "The X-Files" slogan).

Many who favor an extraterrestrial explanation claim that aliens physically make the patterns themselves from spaceships; others suggest that they do it using invisible energy beams from space, saving them the trip down here. Still others believe that it is human, not extraterrestrial, thought and intelligence that is behind the patterns - not in the form of hoaxers but some sort of global psychic power that manifests itself in wheat and other crops.

Another triskelion crop circle. The symbol can be used to represent cycles, progress or competition.

Credit: Thomas J. Sutter, Jr. public domain

While there are countless theories, the only known, proven cause of crop circles is humans. Their origin remained a mystery until September 1991, when two men confessed that they had created the patterns for decades as a prank to make people think UFOs had landed (they had been inspired by the 1966 Tully UFO report). They never claimed to have made all the circles - many were copycat pranks done by others - but their hoax launched the crop circle phenomena.

Most crop circle researchers admit that the vast majority of crop circles are created by hoaxers. But, they claim, there's a remaining tiny percentage that they can't explain. The real problem is that (despite unproven claims by a few researchers that stalks found inside "real" crop circles show unusual characteristics), there is no reliable scientific way to distinguish "real" crop circles from man-made ones.

While there are always a few exceptions, virtually all crop circles share a set of common characteristics.

Circles. Crop circles, as the name implies, almost always involve circles - rarely triangles, rectangles, or squares, though some designs contain straight or curved lines. Perhaps not coincidentally, a circle is the easiest pattern for hoaxers to create.

This design of three flying birds was created on Aug. 3, 2003, in the county of Wiltshire in southern England. The birds, which resemble swallows, have ever-diminishing circles trailing behind their wing tips.

Credit: public domain

Nocturnal creation. Crop circles are formed overnight, often sighted by farmers or passersby the next morning. Though there seems no logical reason for extraterrestrials or earth energies to only create patterns at night, it is obviously a great advantage for hoaxers to create the designs under the cover of darkness; full moon nights are especially popular.

Camera shyness. Crop circles have never been recorded being made (except, of course, for those created by hoaxers). This is a very suspicious trait; after all, if mysterious earthly forces or aliens are at work, there's no reason to think that they wouldn't happen when cameras are recording.

Access to roads. Crop circles usually appear in fields that provide reasonably easy public access, close to roads and highways. They rarely appear in remote, inaccessible areas. Because of this, the patterns are usually noticed within a day or two of their creation by passing motorists.

There are many theories about what creates crop circles, including aliens, mysterious vortices, time travelers and wind patterns, but they all lack one important element: good evidence. The only known cause of crop circles is humans. Perhaps one day a mysterious, unknown source will be discovered for crop circles, but until the perhaps they are best thought of as collective public art.

Additional resources

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Crop circles - strange patterns that appear mysteriously overnight in farmers' fields-provoke puzzlement, delight and intrigue among the press and public alike. The circles are mostly found in the United Kingdom, but have spread to dozens of countries around the world in past decades.

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PT #6

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They may not be evidence of UFOs, ancient spirits or secret weapons, but there is something magical in their allure

By Rob Irving and Peter Brookesmith

smithsonianmag.com

When Doug Bower and his co-conspirator Dave Chorley first created a representation of a "flying saucer nest" in a wheat field in Wiltshire, England, in 1976, they could not have foreseen that their work would become a cultural phenomenon.

Almost as soon as crop circles became public knowledge, they attracted a gaggle of self-appointed experts. An efflorescence of mystical and magical thinking, scientific and pseudo-scientific research, conspiracy theories and general pandemonium broke out. The patterns stamped in fields were treated as a lens through which the initiated could witness the activity of earth energies and ancient spirits, the anguish of Mother Earth in the face of impending ecological doom, and evidence of secret weapons testing and, of course, aliens. Today, one of the more vigorously promoted ideas is that they are messages, buried in complex numerological codes, concerning a Great Change connected to the pre-Columbian Mayan calendar and due to occur in 2012.

To appreciate how these exotic responses arose, we need to delve a little into history. Before today's circle-makers entered the picture, there had been scattered reports of odd patterns appearing in crops, ranging from 17th century pamphlets to an 1880 account in Nature to a letter from astronomer Patrick Moore printed in 1963 in New Scientist. In Australia, the mid- to late-1960s saw occasional reports of circles in crops, and they were often ascribed to UFO landings. At around the same time in England, the Wiltshire town of Warminster became a center of UFO-seeking "sky watches" and gave birth to its own rumors of crop circles, or "saucer nests." None of these, unfortunately, was photographed.

It was such legends that Bower had in mind when, over a drink one evening in 1976, he suggested to his pal Chorley: "Let's go over there and make it look like a flying saucer has landed." It was time, thought Doug, to see a saucer nest for himself.

Since then, crop circles have been reported worldwide in a multitude of crops. In southern England, which sees most activity, circle-makers tend to concentrate on canola, barley and wheat. These grow and are harvested in an overlapping progression: canola from April through May, barley throughout May and June, and wheat from June until early September. In recent years the occasional rudimentary pattern has been found in corn, extending the crop circle season as late as October. Since Bower and Chorley's circles appeared, the geometric designs have escalated in scale and complexity, as each year teams of anonymous circle-makers lay honey traps for New Age tourists.

A crucial clue to the circles' allure lies in their geographical context. Wiltshire is the home of Stonehenge and an even more extensive stone circle in the village of Avebury. The rolling downs are dotted with burial mounds and solitary standing stones, which many believe to be connected by an extensive network of "leys," or paths of energy linking these enchanted sites with others around the country. It is said that this vast network is overlaid in the form of "sacred geometries." The region has also given rise to a rich folklore of spectral black dogs, headless coachmen and haunted houses.

Crop circles are a lens through which we can explore the nature and appeal of hoaxes. Fakes, counterfeits and forgeries are all around us in the everyday world-from dud $50 bills to spurious Picassos. People's motives for taking the unreal as real are easily discerned: we trust our currency, and many people would like to own a Picasso. The nebulous world of the anomalous and the paranormal is even richer soil for hoaxers. A large proportion of the population believes in ghosts, angels, UFOs and ET visitations, fairies, psychokinesis and other strange phenomena. These beliefs elude scientific examination and proof. And it's just such proof that the hoaxer brings to the table for those hungry for evidence that their beliefs are not deluded.

False evidence intended to corroborate an existing legend is known to folklorists as "ostension." This process also inevitably extends the legend. For, even if the evidence is eventually exposed as false, it will have affected people's perceptions of the phenomenon it was intended to represent. Faked photographs of UFOs, Loch Ness monsters and ghosts generally fall under the heading of ostension. Another example is the series of photographs of fairies taken by Elsie Wright and Frances Griffiths at Cottingley, Yorkshire, between 1917 and 1920. These show that the motive for producing such evidence may come from belief, rather than from any wish to mislead or play pranks. One of the girls insisted till her dying day that she really had seen fairies-the manufactured pictures were a memento of her real experience. And the photos were taken as genuine by such luminaries as Sir Arthur Conan Doyle-the great exponent, in his Sherlock Holmes stories, of logic.

The desire to promote evidence of anomalous and paranormal events as genuine springs from deep human longings. One is a gesture toward rationalism-the notion that nothing is quite real unless it's endorsed by reasoned argument, and underwritten by more or less scientific proofs. But the human soul longs for enchantment. Those who don't find their instinctive sense of the numinous satisfied by art, literature or music-let alone the discoveries of science itself-may well turn to the paranormal to gratify an intuition that mystery dwells at the heart of existence. Such people are perfectly placed to accept hoaxed evidence of unexplained powers and entities as real.

And so, the annual appearance of ever more complex patterns in the wheat fields of southern England is taken by "croppies"-the devotees who look beyond any prosaic solution for deeper explanations-as signs and wonders and prophecies. The croppies do, however, accept that some people, some of the time, are making some of the formations. They regard these human circle-makers as a nuisance, contaminators of the "evidence," and denounce them as "hoaxers." The term is well chosen, for it implies social deviance. And therein lies the twist in the story.

In croppy culture, common parlance is turned on its head. The word "genuine" usually implies that something has a single, identifiable origin, of established provenance. To the croppy it means the opposite: a "genuine" circle is of unknown provenance, or not man-made-a mystery, in other words. It follows that the man-made circle is a "hoax."

Those circle-makers who are prepared to comment on this semantic reversal do so with some amusement. As far as they're concerned, they are creating art in the fields. In keeping with New Age thought, it is by dissociating with scientific tradition that the circle-makers return art to a more unified function, where images and objects are imbued with special powers.

This art is intended to be a provocative, collective and ritual enterprise. And as such, it is often inherently ambiguous and open to interpretation. To the circle-maker, the greater the range of interpretations inspired in the audience the better. Both makers and interpreters have an interest in the circles being perceived as magical, and this entails their tacit agreement to avoid questions of authorship. This is essentially why croppies regard "man-made" circles as a distraction, a "contamination."

Paradoxically, and unlike almost all other modern forms of art, a crop circle's potential to enchant is animated and energized by the anonymity of its author(s). Doug Bower now tells friends that he wishes he had kept quiet and continued his nocturnal jaunts in secret. Both circle-makers and croppies are really engaged in a kind of game, whose whole purpose is to keep the game going, to prolong the mystery. After all, who would travel thousands of miles and trek through a muddy field to see flattened wheat if it were not imbued with otherworldly mystique?

As things stand, the relationship between the circle-makers and those who interpret their work has become a curious symbiosis of art and artifice, deception and belief. All of which raises the question: Who's hoaxing whom?

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By Rob Irving and Peter Brookesmith smithsonianmag.com When Doug Bower and his co-conspirator Dave Chorley first created a representation of a "flying saucer nest" in a wheat field in Wiltshire, England, in 1976, they could not have foreseen that their work would become a cultural phenomenon.

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PT #6

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Ears of wheat prickled my shins and the sun beat down on my neck as I trudged through the tractor lines of a golden field on Wiltshire's Hackpen Hill. It was August - the height of crop circle season - and I'd been directed here by frenzied online reports of a new formation, which had appeared, as they are wont to do, overnight; apparently unseen by observers. From the ground, I could make out nothing but intersecting lines of trampled wheat - but photographed from above the pattern resembled a crosshair.

Was this the nexus for some kind of potent Earth energy? Or, terrifyingly, a target for extra-terrestrial weaponry? In this instance, something more mundane. "That's the logo of the Barge Inn down in Honeystreet," chuckled a fellow visitor, a potbellied man in a Dark Side of the Moon T-shirt. "Probably man-made, this one."

Although such formations have appeared worldwide, from California to the rice paddies of Indonesia, south-west England is the world capital of crop circles. They are particularly concentrated in the county of Wiltshire, where a treasure trove of ancient history includes the Neolithic sites of Stonehenge and Avebury - both crop circle hotspots.

Carving artwork into the landscape is an age-old tradition in these parts; chalk horses adorn eight hillsides in Wiltshire; while the UK's oldest geoglyph, the stunning Bronze Age Uffington White Horse, sits just across the border in Oxfordshire. Reports of mysterious patterns appearing in wheat, barley and corn fields in the area began to circulate in the 1970s, but it was in the late '80s that the phenomenon exploded. Circles began to appear more frequently and became far more ornate: some resembled trippy fractals; others rune-like hieroglyphs; others stylised animals recalling those of the Nazca Lines in Peru.

The intricacy and size of the formations, coupled with the fact that they would appear overnight, seemingly out of nowhere, baffled locals and farmers alike. In 1996, a crop circle appeared opposite Stonehenge depicting a mathematical fractal called a Julia set; a similar formation that emerged on Milk Hill in 2001 was one of the largest ever, stretching 900ft. A 2008 formation near the Iron Age hill fort of Barbury Castle required decoding by an astrophysicist, who concluded that it was a geometric representation of the first 10 digits of pi.

The phenomenon peaked in the 1990s and early 2000s, but continues today; an average of 30 crop circles appear each year in the UK, around 80% of them in Wiltshire. Formations reported in 2021 have included a hexagonal pattern overlaid with spirals in Avebury, and a pattern of concentric "bubbles" in Tidworth Down. Crop circle season usually begins at the end of May, with the first ripening of the barley, and ends by September when the harvesting of the crops cuts away the circle canvasses.

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As the number of crop circles has grown, so has the mythology surrounding them. Some invoke the theory of ley lines: mystical seams of spiritual energy that intersect at sacred sites like Avebury and Stonehenge. Others claim that the circles are created by an extra-terrestrial intelligence attempting to warn humanity about climate change, nuclear war and similar existential threats. One even appeared in May 2020 in the shape of a coronavirus, leading to feverish speculation that crop circles are trying to give us clues about immunology and Covid-19.

Among those who discount the alien hypothesis, a common theory is that human circle makers "tap into" some kind of collective consciousness, perhaps explaining the prevalence in crop circles of universal mathematical patterns that also occur in nature - the fractal branching of snowflakes and blood vessels and the spiralling shells of molluscs, for example.

The community of seekers who devote their time to researching the paranormal possibilities of crop circles are known as "croppies". Eminent among them is Monique Klinkenbergh, who left behind a life in art publishing in the Netherlands to establish the Crop Circle Exhibition & Information Centre, in the Wiltshire village of Honeystreet. This tiny hamlet has become an unlikely hub for paranormal research; in addition to Klinkenbergh's exhibition centre, it is home to the Barge Inn, where croppies gather to swap reports of new crop circles and speculate on their origins.

Klinkenbergh's life changed in 2007 when she saw a picture of an ornate geometric crop circle. "Having a background in art, I failed to understand how 13-fold geometry could appear in a cornfield in such a short time span, in darkness, on uneven terrain and unnoticed," she said. "The more I learnt about the phenomenon, the more I was amazed. Credible people were witnessing incredible things." She has now devoted her time to the study of one of England's most enduring mysteries.

Reports of cameras suddenly breaking and car engines turning themselves on in the vicinity of crop circles are common. "I've seen several orbs of light," said Klinkenbergh. "I once saw a UFO; not a classic flying saucer, but a strange object hanging stationary in the air and eventually flying away with enormous speed. According to locals, these lights and strange objects have been witnessed for centuries."

Then there are the sceptics. As long ago as the 19th Century, scientist John Rand Capron described basic flattened circles in crops and suggested they could be caused by "cyclonic wind", a theory later echoed by Stephen Hawking, but this does not explain the complex formations more common today. "The true course of meteorological research got overwhelmed by the efforts of hoaxers," the Tornado and Storm Research Organisation (TORRO) told me in a statement. "All the complex circles of the last 30 years are manmade."

Foremost among the hoaxers are Doug Bower and Dave Chorley, who in 1991 claimed to have created hundreds of circles using ropes to measure the formations and wooden planks to flatten the crops. They demonstrated this technique for waiting television crews - but not everyone is convinced by their evidence. "Some of the formations are so intricate and so big that I can't see two people doing them," said Tim Carson, a farmer in the Wiltshire village of Alton Barnes. "Some of them are 300m long and they go over the brow of a hill. How would you know the other person's doing the same thing you are?"

Carson is more qualified than most to comment, having seen hundreds of crop circles appear in his fields - ravaging thousands of pounds worth of crops in the process. It all began in 1990, when a famous formation known as the Eastfield Pictogram appeared overnight in one of Carson's fields. It caught the attention of the world's press, and a photograph of the crop circle was even used as cover art by Led Zeppelin. "Within days we had thousands of people turning up," Carson said. "We charged people a pound a time, had keyrings and T-shirts made. It became probably our most profitable quarter of an acre ever."

To some, this supports the theory that crop circles are nothing more than a money-making enterprise between the hoaxers, farmers and photographers. The process was explained to me as follows by circle maker Dene Hine: "Circle makers make a formation; drone pilot flies the formation; [they then use] social media platforms to spam all the pages with videos. Each video can make £500 from YouTube alone."

Social media is not just a marketplace for the crop circle business. It is a battleground for the toxic, parasitic relationship between the croppies and the hoaxers: conjoined twins who profess to hate one another yet feed on the other for their existence. To the sceptical mind, after all, there would be no crop circles without the hoaxers. Yet, without the mystique and intrigue generated by the croppies, it's hard to imagine the hoaxers would bother at all. Nevertheless, barbs are exchanged, and not just virtually; more than one croppie told me they had been physically threatened by hoaxers and photographers. "I've seen fistfights break out," said Kathy Rossellini, an energy healer and psychic medium who I met at the Crop Circle Exhibition & Information Centre. "But I don't get involved with all that. It's been hijacked by ego."

There is much that remains enigmatic about crop circles, even to farmers like Carson, who has tired of the whole thing and now deters visitors by cutting out any formations as soon as they appear. He spoke of watches stopping inside circles and recording equipment inexplicably failing during a visit from the BBC's Newsround in 1991. He has allowed companies including Nissan to build corporate crop circles in his fields for use in advertising, but claims that just a basic design took professionals 12 hours of daylight to produce, in contrast to the suggestion that hoaxers produce circles quickly in the dead of night.

"Some of the circles are mysterious, without doubt," he said. "Sometimes the crops appear woven, lying one way and another on top of each other. That would take hours and hours to do by hand."

What, then, to make of crop circles? Are they the work of human hands, driven by some emergent cosmic subconsciousness; aliens; hoaxers? Does it matter?

"Even in the manmade circles, a phenomenon exists, which for me is where the mystery lies," said Rossellini. "People say to me, 'Are they real?' Of course they are. You're standing in it."
Hidden Britain is a BBC Travel series that uncovers the most wonderful and curious of what Britain has to offer, by exploring quirky customs, feasting on unusual foods and unearthing mysteries from the past and present.
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Ears of wheat prickled my shins and the sun beat down on my neck as I trudged through the tractor lines of a golden field on Wiltshire's Hackpen Hill. It was August - the height of crop circle season - and I'd been directed here by frenzied online reports of a new formation, which had appeared, as they are wont to do, overnight; apparently unseen by observers.

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PT #6

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His work saturates modern horror and literary fiction. He has directly influenced countless writers of modern horror, from Stephen King to Junji Ito to Guillermo del Toro. His monsters - and the men who encounter their cosmic evil - have left imprints everywhere from Alien designer H.R. Giger to the otherworldly tentacle monsters of Stranger Things to True Detective's Rust Cohle. There's a prehistoric sea cucumber named after his most famous creation, Cthulhu.

Yet H.P. Lovecraft and his works of literary horror are long overdue for a cultural reckoning - because Lovecraft may have been one of the 20th century's most influential writers, but he was also one of its most gallingly racist.

Lovecraft leaves no room for a debate about separating the artist from their art. He injected many of his most famous and beloved stories with overt racist metaphors and frequent blunt literal racism. For the past decade or so, as the extent of his racism has become more widely known and acknowledged, horror and fantasy writers whose landscapes are saturated with Lovecraft's influence have been trying to figure out what to do about him. Matt Ruff's 2016 novel Lovecraft Countrywas one of the first attempts at an answer. By centering Black characters who were often the metaphorical villains of Lovecraft's stories, the book allows for a new layer of meaning to map onto Lovecraft's old fears.

With HBO's adaptation of Lovecraft Country into a 10-episode drama, that broader, overdue cultural reckoning may have finally arrived. The series, helmed by Misha Green and produced by Jordan Peele, places Black protagonists and horror nerds at the center of a proper Lovecraftian mystery. The story teems with all the typical Lovecraftian tropes: creepy New England villages, dark mansions with esoteric secrets, and tentacle monsters shipped direct from the cosmic void; but it's also full of very realistic horror, in the form of the racist police violence and white supremacy our heroes must confront at every turn.

Necessarily, Lovecraft Country's approach to Lovecraft's legacy is simultaneously one of shrewd affection and resigned repugnance. For the problem with Lovecraft is that Lovecraft is everywhere. His influence is so ubiquitous within horror and fantasy that you simply can't ignore it - nor is it always easy or simple to subvert it.

What we can do is explain it. With Lovecraft, it's helpful to understand both how and why his stories were so influential, and why there's been so much hand-wringing over how to think about and discuss them since.

Lovecraft grew up haunted by madness and death

H.P. Lovecraft was a turn-of-the-20th-century author whose works were a key part of the subgenre of horror that would come to be known as "Weird fiction." Born in Providence in 1890, Lovecraft grew up with an agonizing fear of both death and mental collapse. When he was 3 years old, his father had a psychological breakdown, probably related to syphilis,and Lovecraft moved in with his mother's wealthy family.

His father's confinement in an asylum and his maternal grandmother's death - which occurred not long after Lovecraft moved into the matriarchal family manse - were looming events of his childhood, and Lovecraft became obsessed with the fear that he, too, might experience a psychological breakdown. As a teen he suffered severe social anxiety and agoraphobia, and poured himself into voracious reading and studying, especially horror fiction and astronomy.

Although Lovecraft was extremely well-read, between his family's financial decline in his boyhood and what seem to have been his own episodes of mental illness, he never graduated high school. By the time his mother also began to experience signs of psychological breakdown - perhaps also because of syphilis - Lovecraft was in his late 20s, and his fear of mental illness, his raging xenophobia, and his fixation on the cosmos as a reflection for all the dread he felt were well established through his writing.

(It's not clear where Lovecraft's racism and xenophobia originated, though his upbringing may naturally have had a lot to do with it. Even his biographer and ardent supporter S.T. Joshi notes that Lovecraft's love of science wouldn't have supported his views, since "the brute fact is that by 1930 every 'scientific' justification for racism had been demolished." What is clear is that by the early 1930s, Lovecraft was passionately espousing his racist viewpoints in letters to friends, defending white lynch mobs, and trumpeting Hitler with praise that may seem eerily familiar these days: "I know he's a clown but god I like the boy!")

By that time, he'd also established himself as a writer by contributing to the magazine medium commonly referred to as pulp fiction.

Pulp fiction made up the first wave of the geek magazine medium that would later become known as zines. Still popular in geek culture today, zines are a combination of fictional anthology and community bulletin, mailed or emailed to contributors and subscribers.

Prevalent throughout the early 20th century, pulp fiction titles were mass market, often distributed for free or a relatively low fee. They were full of stories and discussions of the day, and functioned as a kind of niche writing circle. Subsequently, within the speculative fiction community - horror, science fiction, and fantasy writing - they fostered most of the now-seminal literature of the first half of the century; Conan the Barbarian, Tarzan, Flash Gordon, Buck Rogers, and Perry Mason were all characters who appeared first, and often only, in pulp fiction series. Nobel Prize winner Sinclair Lewis edited a pulp, and nearly every 20th-century genre author you've ever heard of appeared in one at some point.

Lovecraft grew to become hugely involved in this community both as a writer and as an opinionated reader. One of the most popular pulps of the day was the popular Weird Tales, which ran from the '20s to the '50s and published hugely important genre authors like Ray Bradbury, Robert Bloch, and many more. It also published many of Lovecraft's own works - nearly all short stories - and helped him gain a following. The sprawling vast horror subgenre that Lovecraft codified and popularized ultimately became known as "Weird" fiction (the W is capitalized to indicate that it's a genre) partly because of the pulp's influence.

As a writer, Lovecraft was extremely generous. He frequently mentored and encouraged other writers, and fostered among his devoted cult of acolytes a "share and share alike" mentality that turned his stories into a kind of giant sandbox where everyone was invited to play. He freely gave every writer around him permission to write fanfiction of his works, be they remixes of his stories or new stories with crossover elements. Countless other horror writers throughout the 20th and 21st centuries have set their own stories within the fictional universe Lovecraft created, often referred to as the Cthulhu Mythos or simply "the Mythos."

This act - allowing people to share his ideas and his story elements - probably did more than anything else to help spread Lovecraft's stories and his particular view of horror: what we call "Lovecraftian" today. But Lovecraft never reaped any broader acclaim for his work in his lifetime. He died penniless and unknown in 1937, at the age of 46, just before World War II.

Yet among his fans, Lovecraft had fostered such a loyal cult following of horror aficionados that his influence spread slowly and steadily throughout the remainder of the century. Legions of horror and fantasy writers who came after Lovecraft spread his influence further - until today his influence is essentially ubiquitous within the horror landscape.

Lovecraft had very specific visions of very vast cosmic horror

Lovecraft is often credited with creating Weird fiction, and he did coin the term, but he emphatically didn't invent the genre. He was writing within a broader tradition of supernatural fantasy that had been growing and evolving since the first works of gothic horror were published in the late 1700s. In particular, Lovecraft was working under the influence of a subset of Victorian and Edwardian authors, both British and American, who dabbled in the idea of nature as a source of existential dread. These writers, like Algernon Blackwood, M.R. James, Ambrose Bierce, Robert W. Chambers, and Arthur Machen, would all come to be hugely influential in the development of Weird fiction and specifically Lovecraft's view of horror.

All of these writers tended to play with the idea that unnatural or supernatural elements, perhaps even entire worlds, lurked just outside civilization, often adjacent or right next door to it; their unassuming (white male) characters often stumbled into or encountered these worlds and supernatural forces by accident. Lovecraft, working within the tradition in fiction of borrowing from and remixing other stories, often directly borrowed story elements from many of his fellow writers. Several recurring images run throughout their collective works, such as Bierce's fictional city of Carcosa and Chambers's " the Yellow King," both signifiers of encounters with other worlds and the unholy, unknowable monster who rules them.

What Lovecraft contributed to this general vibe was a deeply lush writing style, a throwback to the stylization of gothic horror and fantasy of the 19th century. He became known for gravely serious, detail-rich descriptions of untold "eldritch" horrors, often blended with existential wonder. These descriptions nearly always included his fictional characters confronting the idea of a cold, different, and perhaps even actively hostile cosmic universe.

Lovecraft's confrontations usually involve his characters experiencing brief brushes with terrifying otherworldly phenomena. They're rarely described in detail, but Lovecraft usually provides just enough description to make you feel, along with the characters, as though you've glimpsed the edge of a vast and overwhelming universe full of darkness and terror. One defining example is his most famous story, " The Call of Cthulhu," in which the narrator writes, "I have looked upon all that the universe has to hold of horror."

Cthulhu - pronounced "kuh-THOO-loo" or sometimes "CUT-uh-loo" or "CLUE-loo" - is Lovecraft's most famous monster, introduced in its aforementioned namesake tale. Lovecraft refers to Cthulhu with many different names, including "the Dread One," "Tsathoggua," and "Him Who is not to be Named."

Cthulhu, a giant tentacle monster on a bulbous winged body, is far from a daunting figure these days - look at all these snuggly Cthulhu plushies I found on Etsy! - but to Lovecraft, he was the pinnacle of a race of monsters that Lovecraft called "Elder Gods" or "Great Old Ones." Other gods in this vein included creatures Lovecraft dubbed yog-sothoth, "night-gaunts," and various cryptically named demons. Even while slumbering ominously as he waits to awake and take over the world, Cthulhu has the ability to infiltrate your mind and drive you mad through a constant powerful summons to join him in his lair of darkness. Consequently, in many of Lovecraft's stories, Cthulhu actually does have a cult of followers who are devoted to helping him rise.

There's also an element of an incredible voyage inherent in these stories, which borrows from the influence of other pulpy 19th-century writers like Jules Verne. Often, Lovecraft's characters are doomed travelers or explorers who make dark treks across the Earth - or even just across New England - to find a lost city, or to find and read a forbidden book.

The Arctic was a popular destination, since in the Mythos, many of Lovecraft's monsters slumber in a lost city at the bottom of the world called R'lyeh. But Lovecraft also placed monsters throughout America - like in Mammoth Cave, Kentucky - and very frequently in fictional towns in Massachusetts and Rhode Island.

In fact, Lovecraft's fictional universe was most often directly in his own backyard. His most famous fictional New England settings include the small, mysterious town of Arkham, Massachusetts, where one of his most famous characters, "Reanimator" Herbert West, lived and worked. Then there's Dunwich, home to the " Dunwich Horror " and the fictional Miskatonic University, where one of Lovecraft's most famous inventions, the Necronomicon or book of the dead, supposedly resides.

Nearly all of these encounters with cosmic terror end up with Lovecraft's narrators going mad, fearing that they will go mad, or - worst of all - realizing that they themselves are somehow directly related to the monster they're afraid of, or slowly becoming the monster themselves. "The monster is me" is a staple of horror fiction these days, and Lovecraft unfailingly used it to turn his fears inward. In Lovecraftian fiction, the safe option for the narrator is ultimately madness - because to him, the far worse alternative is recognizing that you are the thing you hate.

And this is where Lovecraft's writing turns both brilliant and inescapably racist. Because much of this metaphor is built not just around Lovecraft's dread of the universe, but his fear of race-mixing.

Lovecraft's racism left a long shadow over the genre he popularized

One of the problems with Lovecraft is that his work and influence was everywhere before most people knew he was anywhere. Despite the spread of his ideas among genre fans and writers, Lovecraft himself didn't become more widely known outside of a cult following until the late 1980s and '90s. Consequently, the popular culture he so thoroughly left his mark on was slow to really parse where that influence came from - or address the fact that the man at the center of it was an extreme racist.

And let's make no bones about it. Lovecraft was an avid, loud, horrific racist - suffice it to say you'll probably fail this "Hitler or Lovecraft?" quiz - and on top of his frequent racist rants in letters and discussions with friends, his racist fears infuse and inform nearly all of his work. Famous Lovecraft short stories like " The Shadow over Innsmouth" (about a seaport town of murderous cultists who are secretly mating with terrifying fish people) and " The Horror of Red Hook" (a story full of textual xenophobia and horror at New York's immigration influx and the "primitive half-ape savagery" of nonwhite New Yorkers) may be beloved and hugely influential, but they're also built on overt racist metaphors. Often these metaphors involve his deep fear of miscegenation (race-mixing), hereditary evil, and his concern that he himself might have an impure bloodline, which all takes his "monster is me" trope in a terrible direction.

Throughout the decades, many of his fans have attempted to argue that actually, Lovecraft wasn't that racist, and that he would have eventually turned away from his beliefs if he'd only lived longer. This is a terrible argument; Lovecraft's form of racism was already profoundly more extreme than the "typical" racism of his time, and the assumption that he was growing more tolerant in his beliefs is based on wishful thinking. And as the genre has begun to diversify its scope over the past decade or so, more people have realized that.

This debate about how racist Lovecraft actually was, and what to do about it, has played out directly among the community of the World Fantasy Award - which traditionally, from its founding in 1975, awarded a bust of Lovecraft's head as its trophy. In 2011, the Black writer Nnedi Okorafor won the annual honor, and only realized Lovecraft's legacy after a horrified friend pointed out to her that the man whose head sat upon her mantle was a lifelong, virulent racist.

When Okorafor wrote a blog post about how conflicted she felt that "a statuette of this racist man's head is one of my greatest honors as a writer," including in it Lovecraft's most overtly racist piece of writing, she drew inescapable new attention to a subject that had largely been buried and forgotten.

In 2014, writer Daniel José Older began a petition to change the World Fantasy Awardto a bust of Black writer Octavia Butler. That same year, Black writer Sofia Samatar won the honor, and said in her acceptance speech, "I can't sit down without addressing the elephant in the room, which is the controversy surrounding the image that represents this award." The following year, in 2015, the awards finally retired Lovecraft's image - which caused controversy both because many people felt the move was years overdue and because some were furious at what they saw as the erasure of Lovecraft's legacy.

The conversations have been ongoing among horror fans ever since.Speaking at the " Shadow Over Lovecraft" discussion on Lovecraft's racism, held in New York in 2019 by the Miskatonic Institute (a recurring panel series named for Lovecraft's fictional university), Lovecraft Country author Matt Ruff discussed the ways Lovecraft's fear of the other, even though it was rooted in racism, was also relatable on a basic level.

"In giving vent to his bigotry, he taps into a larger fear that I think we all have of people who are different from us and mean us no good," he said. "It's one of the reasons you can take his stories and repurpose them. ... He may not have realized the universalism of some of what he was writing about, but I can take that away from his work."

In other words, there's something timeless and universally appealing about much of Lovecraft's fiction that keeps even reluctant readers coming back to him. That doesn't mean one has to overindulge; "not reading Lovecraft's letters is a form of self-care," writer Ruthanna Emrys quipped on the same panel.

Still, there's an extent to which all of this discussion has been taking place within Lovecraft's niche community of genre writers - still well below the mainstream radar, away from the broader influence of his work. (As late as 2014, it was possible to read Lovecraft explainers in media outlets that made no mention of his racism.) That might finally be changing with HBO's Lovecraft Country now spotlighting the conversation around the author's racist legacy - but it also inevitably yields frustration because Lovecraftian imagery and themes are so embedded within the pop culture landscape.

"He's so woven in, I think for horror as a whole, it would feel to me a little bit like removing an arm," Black horror writer Victor LaValle, who often writes Lovecraftian fiction, told me. "And so instead I feel like an alternative choice is to identify the illness and then maybe you can save the arm."

In many ways, as LaValle pointed out to me, sampling Lovecraft is also an important introduction to the fears that animate the landscape of white America. Whereas European writers often frame their supernatural horror as a kind of wrong turn into a strange place, the American version of that strangeness is usually much more aggressive. "The American versions of that are usually like, they're out to destroy us. They're out to get us. We have to fight," LaValle explained. "Certainly one of the central ideas of America is like, we have to push back - we have to clear what's here to make it civilized place."

"It's no surprise," he continued, "that particularly so many white Americans would be driven somewhat insane by the need to be the light of civilization, but also, unfortunately they're just human beings. So they're filled with flaws ... [and] you see the ways that they throw that onto the groups they fear. This [other] group is criminal. This [other] group is thieves. This [other] group is oversexed. It's all things that they fear in themselves."

The solution, then, is to spread awareness of Lovecraft's legacy alongside the work itself. LaValle told me that with a cultural influence that's so fully saturated, the alternative is to educate and build off what's already there, to try to create something new while still acknowledging what we love about what's old.

"What that means is talking about things, shedding light on things, and beginning to teach the genre as a whole as a way to talk about things that are wrong or broken or outdated. And being able to say, 'We can talk this thing through and then keep the best of it and identify the worst of it.'"

He also stressed capitalizing on Lovecraft's love of fanfiction of his own stories to overwrite that legacy into newer, more progressive visions of horror. For instance, his award-winning Lovecraftian horror novella The Ballad of Black Tom largely revolves around the underlying premise that much of Lovecraft's horror is predicated on ridiculous white privilege. That horrific realization that all Lovecraft's characters undergo that the universe doesn't revolve around them? That's not a problem any Black character would ever have.

"If you're Black," he said, "you don't think the universe as a whole thinks you are wonderful because all you have to do, if you're a Black American, all you have to do is walk through America, and this country teaches you. ... The idea that you would be driven mad because you found out that the universe doesn't think you're special is a joke to me as a Black American."

LaValle, published The Ballad of Black Tom on the same day as Ruff's Lovecraft Country in 2016. Like Lovecraft Country, LaValle's novel is also being developed into a TV series, but by AMC instead of HBO. He points to stories like and HBO's as a sign that modern Black creators are successfully subverting many of the racist tropes that fuel genre media. And genre, he said, is "the pleasant, pleasant casing that makes the medicine go down."

Perhaps that means the universality of Lovecraft's themes can also serve as the fundamental appeal that allows modern horror writers to subvert and ultimately transform his tropes into smart, aware commentaries on the very kind of racism he evinced.

And that's perhaps the biggest Lovecraftian twist of all: the unknown cosmic terror, transformed into something as familiar and tawdry as everyday racism - and then vanquished with the light of understanding in favor of newer, better stories.

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His work saturates modern horror and literary fiction. He has directly influenced countless writers of modern horror, from Stephen King to Junji Ito to Guillermo del Toro. His monsters - and the men who encounter their cosmic evil - have left imprints everywhere from Alien designer H.R.

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PT #6

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Cthulhu’s evil overlord: why the fantasy world turned on HP Lovecraft

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HP Lovecraft wrote the most imaginative and influential horror stories in the English language. Were his bigoted views even more horrific?

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PT #6

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He had one of the bleakest worldviews ever committed to paper, was racist – and could be a terrible writer. So why is HP Lovecraft more popular than ever, asks David Barnett

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Why do human beings speak so many languages?

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Why do human beings speak so many languages?

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The thatched roof held back the sun's rays, but it could not keep the tropical heat at bay. As everyone at the research workshop headed outside for a break, small groups splintered off to gather in the shade of coconut trees and enjoy a breeze. I wandered from group to group, joining in the discussions. Each time, I noticed that the language of the conversation would change from an indigenous language to something they knew I could understand, Bislama or English. I was amazed by the ease with which the meeting's participants switched between languages, but I was even more astonished by the number of different indigenous languages.

Thirty people had gathered for the workshop on this island in the South Pacific, and all except for me came from the island, called Makelua, in the nation of Vanuatu. They lived in 16 different communities and spoke 16 distinct languages.

In many cases, you could stand at the edge of one village and see the outskirts of the next community. Yet the residents of each village spoke completely different languages. According to recent work by my colleagues at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History, this island, just 100 kilometers long and 20 kilometers wide, is home to speakers of perhaps 40 different indigenous languages. Why so many?

We could ask this same question of the entire globe. People don't speak one universal language, or even a handful. Instead, today our species collectively speaks over 7,000 distinct languages.

And these languages are not spread randomly across the planet. For example, far more languages are found in tropical regions than in the temperate zones. The tropical island of New Guinea is home to over 900 languages. Russia, 20 times larger, has 105 indigenous languages. Even within the tropics, language diversity varies widely. For example, the 250,000 people who live on Vanuatu's 80 islands speak 110 different languages, but in Bangladesh, a population 600 times greater speaks only 41 languages.

Why is it that humans speak so many languages? And why are they so unevenly spread across the planet? As it turns out, we have few clear answers to these fundamental questions about how humanity communicates.

Some ideas, but little evidence

Most people can easily brainstorm possible answers to these intriguing questions. They hypothesize that language diversity must be about history, cultural differences, mountains or oceans dividing populations, or old squabbles writ large - "we hated them, so we don't talk to them."

The questions also seem like they should be fundamental to many academic disciplines - linguistics, anthropology, human geography. But, starting in 2010, when our diverse team of researchers from six different disciplines and eight different countries began to review what was known, we were shocked that only a dozen previous studies had been done, including one we ourselves completed on language diversity in the Pacific.

These prior efforts all examined the degree to which different environmental, social and geographic variables correlated with the number of languages found in a given location. The results varied a lot from one study to another, and no clear patterns emerged. The studies also ran up against many methodological challenges, the biggest of which centered on the old statistical adage - correlation does not equal causation.

We wanted to know the exact steps that led to so many languages forming in certain places and so few in others. But previous work provided few robust theories on the specific processes involved, and the methods used did not get us any closer to understanding the causes of language diversity patterns.

For example, previous studies pointed out that at lower latitudes languages are often spoken across smaller areas than at higher latitudes. You can fit more languages into a given area the closer you get to the equator. But this result does not tell us much about the processes that create language diversity. Just because a group of people crosses an imaginary latitudinal line on the map doesn't mean they'll automatically divide into two different populations speaking two different languages. Latitude might be correlated with language diversity, but it certainly did not create it.

Can a simple model predict reality?

A better way to identify the causes of particular patterns is to simulate the processes we think might be creating them. The closer the model's products are to the reality we know exists, the greater the chances are that we understand the actual processes at work.

Two members of our group, ecologists Thiago Rangel and Robert Colwell, had developed this simulation modeling technique for their studies of species diversity patterns. But no one had ever used this approach to study the diversity of human populations.

We decided to explore its potential by first building a simple model to test the degree to which a few basic processes might explain language diversity patterns in just one part of the globe, the continent of Australia.

Our colleague Claire Bowern, a linguist at Yale University, created a map that shows the diversity of aboriginal languages - a total of 406 - found in Australia prior to contact with Europeans. There were far more languages in the north and along the coasts, with relatively few in the desert interior. We wanted to see how closely a model, based on a simple set of processes, could match this geographic pattern of language diversity.

Our simulation model made only three basic assumptions. First, populations will move to fill available spaces where no one else lives.

Second, rainfall will limit the number of people that can live in a place; Our model assumed that people would live in higher densities in areas where it rained more. Annual precipitation varies widely in Australia, from over three meters in the northeastern rainforests to one-tenth of a meter in the Outback.

Third, we assumed that human populations have a maximum size. Ideal group size is a trade-off between benefits of a larger group (wider selection of potential mates) and costs (keeping track of unrelated individuals). In our model, when a population grew larger than a maximum threshold - set randomly based on a global distribution of hunter-gatherer population sizes - it divided into two populations, each speaking a distinct language.

We used this model to simulate language diversity maps for Australia. In each iteration, an initial population sprung up randomly somewhere on the map and began to grow and spread in a random direction. An underlying rainfall map determined the population density, and when the population size hit the predetermined maximum, the group divided. In this way, the simulated human populations grew and divided as they spread to fill up the entire Australian continent.

Our simple model didn't include any impact from contact among groups, changes in subsistence strategies, the effects of the borrowing of cultural ideas or components of language from nearby groups, or many other potential processes. So, we expected it would fail miserably.

Incredibly, the model produced 407 languages, just one off from the actual number.

The simulated language maps also show more languages in the north and along the coasts, and less in the dry regions of central Australia, mirroring the geographic patterns in observed language diversity.

And so for the continent of Australia it appears that a small number of factors - limitations rainfall places on population density and limits on group size - might explain both the number of languages and much of the variation in how many languages are spoken in different locations.

Applying the model elsewhere

But we suspect that the patterns of language diversity in other places may be shaped by different factors and processes. In other locations, such as Vanuatu, rainfall levels do not vary as widely as in Australia, and population densities may be shaped by other environmental conditions.

In other instances, contact among human groups probably reshaped the landscape of language diversity. For example, the spread of agricultural groups speaking Indo-European or Bantu languages may have changed the structure of populations and the languages spoken across huge areas of Europe and Africa, respectively.

Undoubtedly, a wide variety of social and environmental factors and processes have contributed to the patterns in language diversity we see across the globe. In some places topography, climate or the density of key natural resources may be more critical; in others the history of warfare, political organization or the subsistence strategies of different groups may play a bigger role in shaping group boundaries and language diversity patterns. What we have established for now is a template for a method that can be used to uncover the different processes at work in each location.

Language diversity has played a key role in shaping the interactions of human groups and the history of our species, and yet we know surprisingly little about the factors shaping this diversity. We hope other scientists will become as fascinated by the geography of language diversity as our research group is and join us in the search for understanding why humans speak so many languages.

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Why do human beings speak so many languages?

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The thatched roof held back the sun's rays, but it could not keep the tropical heat at bay. As everyone at the research workshop headed outside for a break, small groups splintered off to gather in the shade of coconut trees and enjoy a breeze. I wandered from group to group, joining in the discussions.

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Discusses the progression of cultural knowledge and shared experience

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How beef became a marker of American identity

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On July 4, 1891, Oklahoman farmer Oscar Weber Bilby served his neighbors the very first hamburgers on buns.

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3 and 6

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Polar bears face higher risk of disease in a warming Arctic

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Climate change and sea ice loss leaves polar bears exposed to more diseases, research suggests.

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Similar to the post above, denial of evidence in global warming even when there is picture evidence and how that impacts what we do to help fix it.

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Global Warming Made Helene More Menacing, Researchers Say

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In cooler times, a similarly rare storm over the Southeast would have delivered less rain and weaker winds, a team of scientists concluded in an analysis.

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can be used to discuss the limits of science - PT 3

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Astronomers have taken the first ever image of a black hole, which is located in a distant galaxy.

It measures 40 billion km across - three million times the size of the Earth - and has been described by scientists as "a monster".

The black hole is 500 million trillion km away and was photographed by a network of eight telescopes across the world.

Details have been published today in Astrophysical Journal Letters.

It was captured by the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT), a network of eight linked telescopes.

Prof Heino Falcke, of Radboud University in the Netherlands, who proposed the experiment, told BBC News that the black hole was found in a galaxy called M87.

"What we see is larger than the size of our entire Solar System," he said.

"It has a mass 6.5 billion times that of the Sun. And it is one of the heaviest black holes that we think exists. It is an absolute monster, the heavyweight champion of black holes in the Universe."

The image shows an intensely bright "ring of fire", as Prof Falcke describes it, surrounding a perfectly circular dark hole. The bright halo is caused by superheated gas falling into the hole. The light is brighter than all the billions of other stars in the galaxy combined - which is why it can be seen at such distance from Earth.

The edge of the dark circle at the centre is the point at which the gas enters the black hole, which is an object that has such a large gravitational pull, not even light can escape.

The image matches what theoretical physicists and indeed, Hollywood directors, imagined black holes would look like, according to Dr Ziri Younsi, of University College London - who is part of the EHT collaboration.

"Although they are relatively simple objects, black holes raise some of the most complex questions about the nature of space and time, and ultimately of our existence," he said.

"It is remarkable that the image we observe is so similar to that which we obtain from our theoretical calculations. So far, it looks like Einstein is correct once again."

But having the first image will enable researchers to learn more about these mysterious objects. They will be keen to look out for ways in which the black hole departs from what's expected in physics. No-one really knows how the bright ring around the hole is created. Even more intriguing is the question of what happens when an object falls into a black hole.

What is a black hole?

A black hole is a region of space from which nothing, not even light, can escape

Despite the name, they are not empty but instead consist of a huge amount of matter packed densely into a small area, giving it an immense gravitational pull

There is a region of space beyond the black hole called the event horizon. This is a "point of no return", beyond which it is impossible to escape the gravitational effects of the black hole

Prof Falcke had the idea for the project when he was a PhD student in 1993. At the time, no-one thought it was possible. But he was the first to realise that a certain type of radio emission would be generated close to and all around the black hole, which would be powerful enough to be detected by telescopes on Earth.

He also recalled reading a scientific paper from 1973 that suggested that because of their enormous gravity, black holes appear 2.5 times larger than they actually are.

These two factors suddenly made the seemingly impossible, possible. After arguing his case for 20 years, Prof Falcke persuaded the European Research Council to fund the project. The National Science Foundation and agencies in East Asia then joined in to bankroll the project to the tune of more than £40m.

It is an investment that has been vindicated with the publication of the image. Prof Falcke told me that he felt that "it's mission accomplished".

He said: "It has been a long journey, but this is what I wanted to see with my own eyes. I wanted to know is this real?"

No single telescope is powerful enough to image the black hole. So, in the biggest experiment of its kind, Prof Sheperd Doeleman of the Harvard-Smithsonian Centre for Astrophysics led a project to set up a network of eight linked telescopes. Together, they form the Event Horizon Telescope and can be thought of as a planet-sized array of dishes.

Each is located high up at a variety of exotic sites, including on volcanoes in Hawaii and Mexico, mountains in Arizona and the Spanish Sierra Nevada, in the Atacama Desert of Chile, and in Antarctica.

A team of 200 scientists pointed the networked telescopes towards M87 and scanned its heart over a period of 10 days.

The information they gathered was too much to be sent across the internet. Instead, the data was stored on hundreds of hard drives that were flown to central processing centres in Boston, US, and Bonn, Germany, to assemble the information. Katie Bouman a PhD student at MIT developed an algorithm that pieced together the data from the EHT. Without her contribution the project would not have been possible. Prof Doeleman described the achievement as "an extraordinary scientific feat".

"We have achieved something presumed to be impossible just a generation ago," he said.

"Breakthroughs in technology, connections between the world's best radio observatories, and innovative algorithms all came together to open an entirely new window on black holes."

The team is also imaging the supermassive black hole at the centre of our own galaxy, the Milky Way.

Odd though it may sound, that is harder than getting an image from a distant galaxy 55 million light-years away. This is because, for some unknown reason, the "ring of fire" around the black hole at the heart of the Milky Way is smaller and dimmer.

How to see a Black Hole: The Universe's Greatest Mystery can be seen the UK at 21:00 on BBC Four on Wednesday 10 April.

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Astronomers have taken the first ever image of a black hole, which is located in a distant galaxy. It measures 40 billion km across - three million times the size of the Earth - and has been described by scientists as "a monster".

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da Vinci combines artistic beauty and the natural sciences by its exploration of anatomy, showing how knowledge of the human body can enhance our sense of wonder at the complexity of it.

This piece is based on the idea of perfect human proportions with the notion that the human body is an ideal geometric figure. While, his proportions were groundbreaking for his time, modern understanding of human anatomy shows that these “ideal proportions are not universal and bodies vary widely.

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As a master of the arts, sciences, and everything in between, Leonardo da Vinci is often referred to as a "Renaissance man." While the polymath is perhaps most well known for his masterpiece, it is his scientific sketches that impressively illustrate the encyclopedic knowledge and eclectic interests that have come to define him.

The , a late 15th-century drawing, is a prime example of such work. Intended to explore the idea of proportion, the piece is part work of art and part mathematical diagram, conveying the Old Master 's belief that "everything connects to everything else."

What is the Vitruvian Man?

Leonardo drew the Vitruvian Man, known also as " The proportions of the human body according to Vitruvius, " in 1492. Rendered in pen, ink, and metalpoint on paper, the piece depicts an idealized nude male standing within a square and a circle. Ingeniously, Leonardo chose to depict the man with four legs and four arms, allowing him to strike 16 poses simultaneously.

The Vitruvian Man is based on De Architectura, a building guide written by Roman architect and engineer Vitruvius between 30 and 15 BC. While it is focused on architecture, the treatise also explores the human body-namely, the geometry of "perfect" proportions-which appealed to Leonardo's interest in anatomy and inspired his drawing.

What are the "perfect" proportions?

Two blocks of backwards-written text accompany the drawing. In the first, Leonardo notes that, according to Vitruvius, these are the measurements of the ideal body:

four fingers equal one palm

four palms equal one foot

six palms make one cubit

four cubits equal a man's height

four cubits equal one pace

24 palms equal one man

Additionally, the first set of notes also specifies: "If you open your legs so much as to decrease your height 1/14 and spread and raise your arms till your middle fingers touch the level of the top of your head you must know that the center of the outspread limbs will be in the navel and the space between the legs will be an equilateral triangle. The length of a man's outspread arms is equal to his height."

In the second block of text, the artist describes the model body as fractions:

"From the roots of the hair to the bottom of the chin is the tenth of a man's height"

"From the bottom of the chin to the top of his head is one eighth of his height"

"From the top of the breast to the top of his head will be one sixth of a man"

"From the top of the breast to the roots of the hair will be the seventh part of the whole man."

"From the nipples to the top of the head will be the fourth part of a man."

"The greatest width of the shoulders contains in itself the fourth part of the man."

"From the elbow to the tip of the hand will be the fifth part of a man"

"From the elbow to the angle of the armpit will be the eighth part of the man."

"The whole hand will be the tenth part of the man"

"The beginning of the genitals marks the middle of the man"

"The foot is the seventh part of the man"

"From the sole of the foot to below the knee will be the fourth part of the man"

"From below the knee to the beginning of the genitals will be the fourth part of the man"

"The distance from the bottom of the chin to the nose and from the roots of the hair to the eyebrows is, in each case the same, and like the ear, a third of the face"

The Vitruvian Man Today

Since 1822, the Vitruvian Man has been a part of the permanent collection of the Gallerie dell'Accademia in Venice, Italy. As it's too fragile to be on display, the piece is rarely exhibited. However, even while concealed, the drawing remains a key part of their collection and, ultimately, one of the most important works of the Italian Renaissance.

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The Significance of Leonardo da Vinci's Famous "Vitruvian Man" Drawing

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Around 1492, Leonardo da Vinci drew the "Vitruvian Man." Rendered in pen, ink, and metalpoint on paper, the piece depicts a nude male with the "perfect" proportions. The measurements were outlined by Roman architect and engineer Vitruvius in "Da Architectura," a treatise written between 30 and 15 BC.

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Broad application to all AoK's. Could serve as a case study for the Key Concepts of Value, Beliefs, and Culture.

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The world’s sixth ‘Blue Zone’: Why Singapore values both quantity and quality of life

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When it comes to longevity, few places in the world have seen such a drastic jump in life expectancy as the island city-state in Southeast Asia.