President Franklin Delano Roosevelt visits a West Virginia foundation for children with disabilities in 1935. FDR would go on to found the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis, now known as the March of Dimes. Image Credit: FDR Presidential Library & Museum, Flickr

<p>My grandmother’s 1946 ‘polio summer’ featured quarantines, canceled events, and remote learning. Her story is a reminder that we’ve been here before.</p>

What polio in post-WWII America can teach us about living in a pandemic

<p>‘Allostatic load’ explains how chronic stress can cause wear and tear on the body, increasing your risk of hypertension, depression, diabetes, and more.</p>

<p>‘Allostatic load’ explains how chronic stress can cause wear and tear on the body, increasing your risk of hypertension, depression, diabetes, and more.<br/></p>

How the stress of racism can harm your health—and what that has to do with Covid-19

Melissa Kemp with a Puerto Rican crown-giant anole (Anolis cuvieri). Image courtesy of Melissa Kemp

<p>Paleobiologist Melissa Kemp says humans have been introducing species to the Caribbean since long before Columbus arrived—and she’s helping piece that history together.</p>

Interview: Tropical paleontology and being #BlackInNature

Koch Foundation

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<p>NOVA Next is NOVA’s award-winning digital publication that provides answers from the cutting edge of science and technology. Launched in 2012, we feature in-depth articles and commentaries from some of the most respected journalists, scientists, and engineers. NOVA Next explores the ideas that are changing the future, from the frontiers of synthetic biology to the politics of personalized medicine.</p><p>Let us know what you think. We’re listening on <a href="http://www.facebook.com/NOVAonline">Facebook</a>, <a href="http://twitter.com/novapbs">Twitter</a>, and email.</p><p>If you’re a journalist and have an idea for a story, send it our way.</p>

NOVA Next is NOVA’s award-winning digital publication that provides answers from the cutting edge of science and technology.

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<p>NOVA Next is NOVA’s award-winning digital publication that provides answers from the cutting edge of science and technology.</p>





  
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      <div class="rich-text"><p>On Oct. 20 just after 6 p.m EDT, NASA will attempt a daring touch-and-go when its little-probe-that-could, <a href="https://www.asteroidmission.org/">OSIRIS-REx</a>, tries to snatch a piece of an asteroid. </p><p>The van-sized probe will have three chances to extend its 11-foot arm and touch down on the <a href="https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2020/bennu-top-ten">asteroid Bennu</a> for five seconds, blowing pure nitrogen gas onto the surface and hopefully kicking up a meaningful amount of dust and pebbles to capture and bring back home.</p><p>The sampler head that will touch the asteroid is a bit larger than a dinner plate, and the goal is for it to collect anywhere from 60 grams to 2 kilograms (about 2 ounces to 4.5 pounds) of material. If the mission is successful, scientists will use the samples to learn more about both Bennu’s origins—what minerals it’s made of and where they came from—and our own. Bennu is considered a “primitive asteroid,” which formed something like 4.5 billion years ago and hasn’t changed much since then. That means we might find organic molecules on its surface that can teach us about the beginnings of life on Earth.</p></div>
  

  
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      <div class="rich-text"><p>Researchers will also measure the Yarkovsky effect on Bennu, or the way heat from the sun can change its path over time. That’s especially important because there’s a chance that Bennu, which is about the size of the Empire State Building, might <a href="https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/article/asteroid-dust-ice-age/">crash into Earth</a> sometime late next century. Understanding more about its potential trajectory could help future missions seeking to stop that kind of impact.</p><p>OSIRIS-REx (whose name is an acronym that refers to its research goals) launched from Cape Canaveral, Florida, in late 2016; orbited the sun for a year; and then met up with Bennu in 2018. Since then, it’s been observing its traveling companion closely, mapping Bennu’s surface and practicing flybys at different—and sometimes seriously low—altitudes. In December 2019, the mission team chose primary and backup <a href="https://www.asteroidmission.org/candidate-sample-sites/">sites for touchdown</a>, two relatively smooth patches inside craters among a <a href="https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/article/bennu-surprising-activity-terrain/">sea of boulders</a>.</p><p>Tuesday’s touch-and-go sample collection represents the culmination of all of that effort and exploration. After its attempt(s) at extraterrestrial darts, the probe will go back to orbit before returning home in 2023 with whatever bits of Bennu it managed to grab.</p></div>
  

  
      

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An artist's rendering of NASA’s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft collecting a sample from the asteroid Bennu. Image Credit: NASA/Goddard/University of Arizona

<p>OSIRIS-REx will have just three chances to touch down and snag a sample of the asteroid Bennu as it zooms through space some 204 million miles from Earth.</p>

NASA probe will attempt to grab a piece of an asteroid on Tuesday





  
      <div class="rich-text"><p>The elephants of Gorongosa National Park are notorious troublemakers: grain tramplers, crop stealers, silo destroyers. Given the chance, they will cross the river that acts as a southern boundary between Gorongosa and the rest of rural Mozambique, and raid nearby villages in search of a snack. The materials the community usually uses to build storehouses are “nothing for an elephant,” says <a href="https://gorongosa.org/dominique-goncalvez/">Dominique Gonçalves</a>, an elephant ecologist at the park.</p></div>
  

  
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      <div class="rich-text"><p>In a way, this problem is a sign of success. During the Mozambican Civil War, which stretched from the 1970s into the 1990s, Gorongosa lost more than 90% of its 2,500 elephants. But as of 2019, the population had recovered significantly, reaching 600—and some of its younger males had begun to wander out of the park looking for food.</p><p>As one of Gorongosa’s keystone species, the park’s elephants interact with their environment in a way that is essential to its health. The trees they knock down on their daily walks provide shelter for antelopes and exposed roots for porcupines; the seeds from the huge amounts of greenery they eat are dispersed in their dung, which in turn provides food for dung beetles. Still, “people need their space to have their schools, their markets, their farms,” says Gonçalves, who grew up a few hours away from Gorongosa in Beira. And when people’s ability to meet those basic needs is disrupted, serious conflict can break out. They’re less likely to cooperate with conservation efforts in that case—and in other parts of Africa, communities frustrated by elephants’ raids have killed them in retaliation.</p><p>The solution Gonçalves and her colleagues found is simple and elegant. Using a technique developed in Kenya, they built a series of fences made from beehives strung with twine across the most heavily trafficked river crossings. “Most things in the natural world are ruled by fear and risk aversion,” Gonçalves says. Elephants are afraid of bees, whose stings can be especially painful on their sensitive ears. A pilot study published this year showed that the presence of a <a href="https://conbio.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/conl.12679">beehive fence</a> reduced the odds of an elephant crossing the river by 95%. This idea—that an animal’s perception of danger influences where it spends time, leading to a cascade of effects on its larger ecosystem—is known as the “landscape of fear.”</p>
            <figure class="richtext-image full-width"><img alt="Beehives strung between fence posts" class="richtext-image full-width" height="484" width="800"
            src="https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/media/images/Beehive_fence_1.width-800.jpg"/><figcaption><p>Beehives strung between fenceposts deter elephants from crossing onto farmers&#x27; field near Gorongosa National Park in Mozambique. Image courtesy of Dominique Gonçalves</p><div class="credit"></div></figcaption>
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            <p>Most wild landscapes have certain elements in common: food, shelter, water sources. “Those things are easy in principle to map,” says <a href="https://eeb.princeton.edu/people/robert-pringle">Rob Pringle</a>, an ecologist at Princeton University. “But the other element is, where does the animal feel safe? That is a trickier thing to make tangible.” To put it in human terms, he says, you might avoid a dark alley at 3 a.m. because you perceive it as high risk but find a busy public park at noon to be comparatively safe.</p></div>
  

  
      <div class="rich-text"><p>As it happens, Gorongosa is also the site of a much bigger project exploring this concept. Elephants were not the only animals in Gorongosa that suffered during the Civil War. Almost all of the area’s large carnivores—hyenas, wild dogs, leopards—had their local populations wiped out. But the landscape itself remained undamaged. That meant the remaining herbivores, including baboons and a variety of antelope species, bounced back fairly quickly once the war ended.</p><p>The result was an exceptionally low-risk setting for these herbivores, and over the next two decades they began to behave accordingly. Baboons, which normally sleep in trees, began sleeping on the ground. Warthogs stopped digging holes, holes that are normally important habitat for other species. And a type of antelope called a “bushbuck” began leaving the cover of the bush to browse more nutritious plants on wide-open plains that were normally too dangerous. This access to better quality food caused the bushbuck population to skyrocket.</p></div>
  

  
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      <div class="rich-text"><p>Before Steven Lima and Lawrence Dill <a href="http://gambusia.zo.ncsu.edu/readings/Lima%20and%20Dill%201990.pdf">proposed</a> the landscape of fear theory in the 1990s, prevailing ideas about ecosystem dynamics were much more simplistic: more predators means more prey killed, and fewer predators means more prey survive. “The default idea was that carnivores kept plants healthy by keeping herbivores at low abundance,” Pringle says—and, of course, that’s true to an extent. But that idea, he argues, misses part of the predator-prey dynamic by ignoring how prey animals change their behavior in response to their predators while they’re still alive. The outcomes are similar, but the mechanism is totally different.</p><p>Looking to substantiate the theory, Oz Schmitz of Yale University famously <a href="https://science.sciencemag.org/content/319/5865/952/tab-figures-data">showed</a> that the presence of spiders in a cage with grasshoppers was enough to modify plant growth as the grasshoppers changed their diets—even when Schmitz altered the spiders’ mouthparts so they couldn’t hunt the grasshoppers. In a similar experiment with <a href="https://esajournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1890/11-0424.1">crabs and snails</a>, just the scent of a crab was enough to cause snails to change their feeding behavior. Many scientists also see this dynamic at play in willow and <a href="https://www.yellowstonepark.com/things-to-do/wolves-bring-yellowstone-back">aspen resurgence</a> in Yellowstone National Park after the reintroduction of wolves there in 1994 changed the behavior of the elk that eat those trees. And in Gorongosa, a study by Pringle and several colleagues <a href="https://science.sciencemag.org/content/364/6436/173">showed</a> the bushbuck could be encouraged to avoid areas of the floodplain with a combination of recorded leopard calls and synthetic big cat urine, a dynamic that intensified when they began reintroducing groups of African wild dogs to the park in 2018.</p><p>That change, in turn, affected plant life in Gorongosa. Herbivores like bushbuck and elephants shape their environments by transplanting nutrients in their urine and feces, by eating young plants and cropping leaves, by trampling their way through underbrush. And where an antelope feels safe “is where it’s going to spend a lot of time feeding,” Pringle says. “So the impact of that animal on plants is going to be stronger in areas where it feels safe.”</p>
            <figure class="richtext-image full-width"><img alt="Girls with tranquilized elephant" class="richtext-image full-width" height="600" width="800"
            src="https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/media/images/Girls_with_elephant_Ls8bwR2.width-800.jpg"/><figcaption><p>Dominique Gonçalves and girls from a local community gather with a male elephant that has been tranquilized so it can be fitted with a GPS collar. Image courtesty of Dominique Gonçalves</p><div class="credit"></div></figcaption>
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            <p>Watching the Gorongosa elephants carefully since the start of the park’s beehive fence project, Gonçalves has noticed some unusual behavior. “Sometimes I’ll see them walking along the fence, touching it carefully, and going away,” she says. “Sometimes they just stand and stare at the fence, and I wonder if they’re analyzing what it’s going to do.”</p></div>
  

  
      <div class="rich-text"><p>Not all methods of elephant defense remain effective over time, as the elephants often habituate or learn ways around them. But the fences continue to be effective for now, and Gonçalves and her colleagues hope they will remain so, since pain and fear are such innate and powerful motivators. They’re now working to expand their project, which they hope will grow to involve 600 beehives this winter. (The lengths of the fences themselves vary. Some are just a couple of beehives strung together, but one particularly wide spot involves a dozen.)</p><p>Fear works better than a plain physical barrier, Gonçalves says, because “it works with the mind, with the behavior of the elephant.” In that way, the project sets an important precedent for future conservation in Mozambique—a non-lethal method of control that doesn’t create unnecessary divisions between the community and the park. “That kind of old, fenced conservation may not be really what we want,” she says, because it sends the wrong message to the people who live next door: “That’s the national park, and that’s us. There’s no connection at all.”</p><p>The beehive fences also bring alternative income for these communities (which sell the resulting honey), helping to rebuild relationships between them and their elephant neighbors. “As they come with us, they start to realize that these aren’t just ‘park problems,’” she says of the community members who have joined her team. “They start to realize everyone has a role.” She’s especially proud to have recently hired 15 women, when previously there was only one. “We’re very strongly encouraging women to join,” she adds, “to change perceptions about what women can and cannot do; to remind them what it means for all of us to have our natural heritage and this wildlife around us.”</p></div>
  

  
      

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Ecologist Dominique Gonçalves observes a female lead elephant in Mozambique's Gorongosa National Park. Image courtesy of Dominique Gonçalves

<p>Scientists use animals’ “landscapes of fear” to set limits and reestablish balance in Gorongosa National Park, where top predators were wiped out.</p>

The secret to peace between elephants and farmers in Mozambique? Bees





  
      <div class="rich-text"><p>Karim Jabbari still remembers how painful it was to walk down the street with his family as a child and see his neighbors turn away. “No one was willing to talk to us in public,” he says. Jabbari’s father was a political prisoner, an activist and “public enemy” of the dictatorship that then ruled Tunisia. His family was under strict police surveillance, and anyone seen talking to them was immediately suspect as well.</p></div>
  

  
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      <div class="rich-text"><p>Ten-year-old Jabbari, lonely and missing his father, looked for other ways to fill his time. What he found was his father’s trove of 400-year-old religious texts, inherited from an ancestor who had been a renowned scholar of Islam. The books were written in an old form of North African calligraphy known as Maghrebi script. “It’s an art form that speaks to your soul, even if you don’t understand the message,” he says. “I saw the effort of these people spending so much time, writing a thousand pages by hand. I saw the long nights; I saw my father, his smile.”</p><p>Before long, he was obsessed, copying what he saw in the books over and over until the arcs and lines settled into his muscles. That obsession only grew once he left his hometown of Kasserine to go to boarding school, and his new skill attracted friends—the one thing he’d never had.</p><p>Today, Jabbari, now 42, is a <a href="https://www.karimjabbari.com/">full-time artist</a> based in Canada and the U.S., using murals, graffiti, and specialized technology to bring traditional Arabic calligraphy to an international audience. He worries that a craft that prizes meditative concentration and lengthy training will be lost in an era so focused on agility and speed. His work, he hopes, can serve as a kind of bridge, “a link between conservative traditional calligraphy and our augmented reality.”</p>
            <figure class="richtext-image full-width"><img alt="Light calligraphy at night" class="richtext-image full-width" height="533" width="800"
            src="https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/media/images/img-5506_orig.width-800.jpg"/><figcaption><p>Karim Jabbari uses long-exposure photography to capture words written with handheld lights. Image courtesy of Karim Jabbari</p><div class="credit"></div></figcaption>
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            <p>Calligraphy—and calligraphers—have resisted new technologies for centuries. For starters, Arabic and its sibling, Persian, used non-Latin alphabets that made them difficult to adapt for use in printing technology developed in the West, says <a href="https://web.ece.ucsb.edu/~parhami/">Behrooz Parhami</a>, an engineer who has studied how Arabic and Persian scripts have evolved alongside technology. Physical typefaces built for <a href="https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/video/a-to-z-the-first-alphabet/">Persian and Arabic’s connected letters</a> are more fragile, prone to chipping and cracking. And if they aren’t perfectly made, white spaces appear between letters that shouldn’t be there.</p></div>
  

  
      <div class="rich-text"><p>The scripts also included letters with elements stacked on top of neighboring letters, which was impossible to recreate using the separate blocks of moveable type. And they varied in height and width much more than Latin characters, meaning that the common printing practice of adjusting typefaces to make letters about the same size would render words illegible. That “would be disastrous,” Parhami says. “It would be very difficult to read.”</p><p>It therefore makes sense that in Persia and the Arab world, words simply remained handwritten for centuries longer than in Europe, Parhami says. The printing press spread quickly across Western Europe in the 1460s and 70s, but it would be another 250 years before the Ottomans, who ruled much of the Muslim world, allowed the opening of a print shop. In Persia, it would be nearly 400 years before printing became commonplace. And in modern-day Turkey, authorities eventually resolved the typeface issue in the 1920s by changing that country’s script from Arabic-based to Latin-based.</p>
            <figure class="richtext-image full-width"><img alt="Arabic calligraphy in books" class="richtext-image full-width" height="500" width="800"
            src="https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/media/images/my_fathers_books.width-800.png"/><figcaption><p>Karim Jabbari&#x27;s father&#x27;s books. Image Courtesy of Karim Jabbari</p><div class="credit"></div></figcaption>
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            <p>Still, Parhami attributes this delay not just to the technical challenges but also to the hallowed role of the written word in these societies. In the Arab world, calligraphy provided an intimate connection to God through handwritten copying of the Quran and other religious texts. In the region that now largely constitutes Iran, the related Persian script (which differs by four letters) grew especially elaborate, driven in part by a rich poetry tradition, making the idea of mechanization—and the changes to writing that would come with it—less appealing. Jabbari’s own connection to his ancestors’ books have helped him understand this tension, he says. Arabic calligraphy’s historic link with the Quran makes it a sacred form, he says. It was revered for centuries “and when the printers come, all of that is going to be dumped? That’s hard.”</p></div>
  

  
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      <div class="rich-text"><p>Although he empathizes, he’s also frustrated to see that same resistance to change in modern Arabic calligraphy’s small, somewhat insular community, which has sometimes been reluctant to embrace innovations like modern fonts, computer-assisted publishing, and social media. Some traditional calligraphers have told him he doesn’t know the “real craft” because he was never able to find a mentor to formally teach him Maghrebi script.  </p><p>“You can be a beautiful, amazing, well-known, traditional calligraphy artist, but your art isn’t speaking to the younger generations,” he says. Refusing to try new things or embrace new technology leaves young people out, he argues, and puts the entire tradition at risk. &quot;&#x27;Your art is dying with you,’ I said to them. I have nothing but respect for you, but I’m taking calligraphy to the streets.”</p><div>
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<p>Although Jabbari also paints murals that incorporate written elements, “taking calligraphy to the streets” usually means light painting: a combination of long-exposure photography and perfectly calibrated movements of a handheld light that captures the loops and swirls of Maghrebi Arabic in thin air. In 2011, after Jabbari’s uncle was shot and killed along with 28 other young men during the beginning of the Arab Spring, he returned to Kasserine to do just such a performance piece. “I wanted to write his name in light painting, the same place where he died,” he says. After he finished honoring his uncle, he gave other families in the area the opportunity to do the same, allowing them to write their loved ones’ names in space—a fleeting memorial fixed on film.</p></div>
  

  
      <div class="rich-text"><p>Light calligraphy is a challenging medium. “You need to know the limits of the camera, what space it’s covering,” he says. “You have all of that space to explore, so you end up using your body as reference: making a line at chest level, or one at hip level.” In practice, that looks something like a combination of dance, meditation, and craft. </p><p>Jabbari has collaborated with dancers and musicians; he once performed in the background of a symphony orchestra in Abu Dhabi; and he builds yoga into his light calligraphy workshops. He recently hired two software developers to create a program that projects his movements in short near-real-time loops onto skyscrapers, a kind of ephemeral graffiti.</p>
            <figure class="richtext-image full-width"><img alt="Light calligraphy indoors" class="richtext-image full-width" height="533" width="800"
            src="https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/media/images/KJ11.width-800.jpg"/><figcaption><p>Light calligraphy by Karim Jabbari. Image Credit: Husam AlSayed</p><div class="credit"></div></figcaption>
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            <p>Since Jabbari arrived in Canada at 20 years old, calligraphy has become an important way for him to hold onto his culture and identity. “I strongly believe that if you don’t know your history, no one will respect you,” he says. “How can you explain to someone who you are, where you come from, if you don’t know that?”</p></div>
  

  
      <div class="rich-text"><p>Calligraphy has taught him that “we are the sum of all the knowledge our ancestors transmitted to one another,” he says. That’s how the art of calligraphy has been passed down—from master to student, who then becomes the next master—and also what calligraphy was for: recording history and wisdom to be shared with the next generation.</p><p>Jabbari hopes his work will inspire the traditionalists to try out something new and the modernists to remember the value of tradition, reminding them what writing can be: a form of escape, an adventure in memory. “The problem is, we’re not writing anymore,” he says. “It’s beautiful to evolve, but if you lose the connection with your roots, you get lost.”</p>
            <figure class="richtext-image full-width"><img alt="Calligraffiti on a wall" class="richtext-image full-width" height="450" width="800"
            src="https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/media/images/towards_the_light2.width-800.jpg"/><figcaption><p>In 2013, Karim Jabbari and a group of teenagers from his hometown of Kasserine, Tunisia, worked for over a month to transform a 750-foot-long prison wall into a massive &quot;calligraffiti&quot; mural as part of a project called Towards the Light. Image courtesy of Karim Jabbari</p><div class="credit"></div></figcaption>
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            <p>A few months after his performance at the site of his uncle’s death, Jabbari returned at the invitation of Tunisia’s newly formed government to the prison where his father was held toward the end of his 13-year sentence. Jabbari and a team of young men from the city, one of the country’s poorest, worked for 45 days covering its outer wall with an enormous calligraphy mural, the longest in North Africa. The piece, which quotes a verse by the Tunisian poet Chebbi, reminds readers that “life does not await those who are asleep.” It struck him as perfect for the moment when so many Arab societies were rejecting their dictators.</p><p>During the Arab Spring, “I saw the birth of a new movement,” he says. In Tunisia, the revolution sparked a renewed interest in “calligraffiti,” which melds traditional calligraphy with a more modern, street-smart “graffiti” style. “This is something really beautiful,” he says. “These are people who are proud of their language. They know what it means to them, as part of their history and heritage, and they’re using it.”</p></div>
  

  
      

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Light calligraphy in Australia. Image courtest of Karim Jabbari

<p>Equipped with a light and a camera, Karim Jabbari hopes his work can serve as a link between conservative traditional calligraphy and our augmented reality.</p>

A calligrapher writes with light to keep tradition alive





  
      <div class="rich-text"><p>The proposal for a mammoth emoji—coming to an iPhone near you next month—doesn’t just give a brief natural history of the extinct pachyderm. It <a href="http://www.unicode.org/L2/L2017/17420-mammoth-emoji.pdf">also includes</a> a chart comparing the incidence of the word “mammoth” in books to “elephant” and “tyrannosaurus” and imagines congratulatory messages that use a mammoth emoji to say an accomplishment is “huge.” </p><p>The proposal for an <a href="http://www.unicode.org/L2/L2018/18077-onion-emoji.pdf">onion emoji</a> (added in 2019) begins with the classic “ogres are like onions” monologue from the movie Shrek, suggesting the emoji could be used to describe a complex situation or person. The <a href="https://www.unicode.org/L2/L2017/17261-bagel-emoji.pdf">bagel proposal</a> offers a long cultural history of the breakfast food, predicts spikes in use on Saturdays and Sundays, and suggests it could catch on as a shorthand for carb-loading athletes.</p></div>
  

  
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      <div class="rich-text"><p>Though it may seem they’ve always been there, emoji started as a grassroots solution to what was in the 1980s and 1990s a relatively new problem: misunderstandings on the internet. In the ensuing decades, these symbols have evolved from simple tone markers to a full-strength industry and language of their own, a phenomenon worthy of business investment and academic research. Hollywood made a whole movie out of emoji (yes, the plural of emoji is…emoji). They turn up on all sorts of merchandise and stand in for slang. Why type out a comment calling a party or a song “straight fire” when you could pull up your emoji keyboard and just tap once?</p><p>That the UNICODE consortium, which oversees emoji, has instituted a lengthy <a href="https://unicode.org/emoji/proposals.html">application process</a> for new emoji shows that it takes seriously the power of a miniaturized wooly mammoth or eggplant or mug of beer. The organization, which is behind much of the standardization of internet alphabets, insists its new emoji be multilayered, ready to be wielded on TikTok and Twitter, and over text. UNICODE has noticed what linguists see, too—that emoji have evolved from a handful of keystrokes into a powerful tool in our 2020 lexicon.</p></div>
  

  
      <div class="rich-text"><h3><b>:-) </b></h3><p>So-called “emoticons” first emerged as a way to head off misreadings of tone and intention in “cyberspace.” In the late 1980s, a professor at Carnegie Mellon named <a href="https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~sef/">Scott Fahlman</a> suggested three keystrokes that would change the world: :-). He called the resulting smiling face a “joke marker,” meant to show forum users that a remark was meant in jest.</p><p>The smiley and its brethren, made from either Latin or Japanese characters, were wildly successful at mitigating virtual conflict. They exploded in popularity, proliferating in such complicated ways—from shrugging ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ to Homer Simpson ~(_8^(I) —that they outgrew their original purpose, becoming difficult to remember or understand. As both a solution and a marketing gimmick, a Japanese telecommunications company began incorporating emoticons into its devices’ texting capabilities, as characters matched to strings of numbers—the way much of text was processed on early cell phones. But these new “emoji” (which come from &quot;e,&quot; meaning picture; &quot;mo,&quot; meaning write; and &quot;ji,&quot; or character, in Japanese) weren’t readable on devices not coded to translate this number system.</p>
            <figure class="richtext-image full-width"><img alt="Emojipedia Tweet with image of new emoji" class="richtext-image full-width" height="1083" width="800"
            src="https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/media/images/Screen_Shot_2020-09-29_at_2.38.01_AM.width-800.png"/><figcaption><div class="credit"></div></figcaption>
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            <p>Eventually, responsibility for emoji was turned over to the <a href="https://home.unicode.org/">UNICODE consortium</a>, a group of tech giants and nation states originally formed in 1991 as a way of standardizing the encoding of alphabets on the internet. At the time, the way computers dealt with text was complicated and prone to errors. Depending on the program or computer model, letters, symbols, and punctuation were represented with different codes—sometimes even within the same language, leading to incompatibilities and occasional gobbledygook on screen. UNICODE offered a single standard way to encode on the back end to help the world’s computers show its many languages consistently and correctly. It made sense that the same thing could be done for emoji.</p><p>Nowadays, UNICODE has exacting <a href="http://unicode.org/emoji/proposals.html#selection_factors">specifications</a> for what becomes an emoji, since it will be hard-coded into our telecommunications. The subcommittee meets weekly, looking over new proposals, asking for improvements and clarifications, and then shepherding the new selection through the design process before implementation. </p><p>They help answer questions like: Are people going to confuse the chipmunk with the squirrel? When you say “Hindu temple,” do you mean one that’s more similar to the temples of southern or northern India? Did anyone notice that the type of wheelchair we’re depicting is more like one found in a hospital, versus one daily wheelchair users would recognize as theirs?</p><p>“When reviewing proposals, one thing I keep an eye out for is, what are they leaving out?” says <a href="https://www.httpcolonforwardslashforwardslashwwwdotjenniferdanieldot.biz/about">Jennifer Daniel</a>, the chair of UNICODE’s emoji subcommittee, an all-volunteer (mostly anonymous) group of engineers, designers, and linguists who oversee the organization&#x27;s exhaustive process for choosing new emoji. This year’s crop, for example, includes a new rope emoji. “It’s innocent; the proposal was banal,” she says, “but when you think about it and you see that knot next to a tree, you have a suicide. You have a lynching. And it’s already pretty easy to be angry online.” Daniel and her colleagues helped adjust the new emoji’s color and alignment. “You can put that new design next to the tree, and it doesn’t have the same orientation,” she says. “Having that kind of empathy is critical to the subcommittee.”</p></div>
  

  
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      <div class="rich-text"><p>A new emoji should be demonstrably different from existing emoji, to avoid confusion and repetition; it should have staying power; and it should be “paradigmatic.” As the UNICODE application form puts it, the emoji “beer mug” represents not just a mug with exactly the shape you see on the screen, filled with beer of exactly that color, but rather <i>beer</i> in general.” That’s in part because of the way UNICODE works: Each platform designs its own, slightly different, image to go with the hard-coded number assigned to a character. So the idea must be conveyed regardless of details.</p><p>And, perhaps most importantly, a new candidate emoji should have layers that give it the potential to be used in metaphor or symbolism. For example, “SHARK is not necessarily only the animal, but also used for a huckster, in jumping the shark, loan shark, etc.,” the UNICODE site notes.</p></div>
  

  
      <div class="rich-text"><h3><b>“Great weather”  </b></h3><p>These layers are important because of what emoji do for language some 30 years on. In the most basic cases, they can set a tone, stand in for social niceties that open and close messages, or fill silences that might otherwise feel awkward, says linguistic anthropologist <a href="https://anthropology.utoronto.ca/people/faculty/marcel-danesi/">Marcel Danesi</a>. But they serve more complicated social purposes, too.</p><p>The key, says cognitive psychologist <a href="http://blogs.chatham.edu/mriordan/">Monica Riordan</a>, is that text—the basis of so much of our communications these days—is a “deprived medium,” one where we don’t have access to other signals like body language, vocal tone, or facial expressions. So, she asks, “how do we make it richer so we can convey meaning in ways that others can understand?”</p><p>Riordan argues that one of our most important uses for emoji is lessening ambiguity. In a conversation where one person remarks on “great weather,” for example, the other person might not know if they’re enjoying sunny skies or breathing wildfire smoke. But adding the <a href="https://emojipedia.org/face-with-symbols-on-mouth/">swearing emoji</a> at the end clears that up, she says. “It tells me your intended meaning, allowing you to speak in ways that are non-literal.”</p><p>Still, she adds, we shouldn’t assume that the emoji we use are just extensions of our own facial expressions. Our expressions are spontaneous, but we choose emoji deliberately— sometimes to convey emotions that don’t match what we really feel.</p>
            <figure class="richtext-image full-width"><img alt="3 new emoji faces and 2 hearts" class="richtext-image full-width" height="300" width="800"
            src="https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/media/images/Screen_Shot_2020-09-29_at_1.13.37_PM.width-800.png"/><figcaption><p>The 217 emoji coming to devices in 2021 include Face in Clouds, Face Exhaling, Face with Spiral Eyes, Mending Heart, and Heart on Fire. Image Credit: Emojipedia </p><div class="credit"></div></figcaption>
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            <p>Riordan <a href="https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0261927X17704238">argues</a> that emoji do what social scientists call “emotion work,” the hidden labor we do to maintain our relationships. If her mother sends her a text message that annoys her, she says, “I don’t want her to know how annoyed I really am, so I might send her a thumbs up. That drives forward relationship maintenance.” If they were to have the same interaction in person, Riordan might not be able to hide her feelings, she says, but emoji make that easier. Sending a thumbs up instead of a more explicit response leaves her mother to draw her own conclusions about Riordan’s meaning. “She’s going to assume I’m agreeing with her, even though I’m not and I never said I was.”</p><p>That ambiguity is “very, very useful for people,” says linguist <a href="https://www.sydney.edu.au/arts/about/our-people/academic-staff/novi-djenar.html">Novi Djenar</a>, who has studied emoji use among <a href="https://books.google.com/books?hl=en&amp;lr=&amp;id=HYLPDwAAQBAJ&amp;oi=fnd&amp;pg=PA107&amp;dq=emoji+linguistics&amp;ots=m8cdHgZMaE&amp;sig=_SYcDUtAvCM5_8CK0SA1WS-BESI#v=onepage&amp;q=emoji%20linguistics&amp;f=false">young people in Indonesia</a>. In the discussion forums Djenar studied, commenters used the ambiguity of emoji to avoid sounding too patronizing or vulnerable. And they even used emoji to navigate complex discussion threads on the forum, mirroring the icons used in messages they agreed with and switching to new emoji to show a change of opinion. Using the same symbols, Djenar says, “you get this really nice ‘cling cling,’ this little bell that says, ‘We’re together in this.’”</p><p>And computational linguist <a href="https://cci.uncc.edu/directory/samira-shaikh">Samira Shaikh</a> has studied the ways emoji can strengthen <a href="http://ceur-ws.org/Vol-2130/paper1.pdf">expressions of solidarity</a> on Twitter and other social media sites, especially during traumatic events like Hurricane Irma and the Charlie Hebdo massacre in Paris. Shaikh and her team found that emoji helped reinforce messages of solidarity, creating themes (folded hands, hearts, flags) that tended to spread through the conversation about that event. “The pictures and vivid colors draw your attention if you’re scrolling past. Once your attention is drawn, you’re more likely to read through the whole message”—and to share or reply, Shaikh says.</p></div>
  

  
      <div class="rich-text"><h3><b>Cactuses and unicorns</b></h3><p>When she’s feeling playful, Daniel, who works on emoji-related issues at Google on top of her volunteer role at UNICODE, often turns to the tornado and poop emoji to refer to her kids. When she’s in a bad mood, the cactus is her go-to choice. “The internet has an insatiable appetite for taking things and giving them whole new meanings,” she says. “I can put it as my status message and everyone understands.”</p><p>Danesi distinguishes the potential of the cactus and other similar “non-face” emoji from emoji that involve facial expressions as “icon versus symbol.” Face emoji form a kind of universal lexicon, he argues, with an emotional meaning almost anyone can understand. Non-face emoji, however, are “inherently negotiable, either situation-specific or culture-specific,” allowing a speaker to create an “idiolect,” a word or set of words whose use is decided by the user, he says. </p><p>A good example would be Daniel’s cactus emoji—or, in Riordan’s case, unicorns. Riordan exchanges unicorn emoji with a friend with whom she once baked a spectacularly failed unicorn birthday cake. “It was a massive disaster, fun but terrible,” Riordan remembers. “As a result of that, sometimes my friend and I will text each other the unicorn emoji to talk about something with good intentions that blew up in our faces.”</p><p>But she also points to larger, culture-wide negotiations over emoji meaning, like the connection of the dark-skin-tone fist emoji with the Black Lives Matter movement as a call to action, or the assignment of the eggplant and peach emoji to certain body parts. “The meaning of emoji reflects what’s happening at a greater societal level,” she says. In the case of the Black fist, the emoji itself has no inherent meaning. It’s the social and cultural context that add meaning or purpose. </p><p>And in the case of the eggplant and peach, Riordan says, “We have a society in which it is not considered acceptable to have actual emoji of a penis, breasts, or a butt, so we’re forced to adopt other symbols for these things. In a sense, the use of the eggplant emoji is a reflection of the taboos of our society.”</p><p>This movement of culture and meaning goes both ways. In keeping with recent updates allowing users to choose their emoji’s skintones, the 2020 UNICODE emoji set features several new gender-neutral and nonbinary emoji, including a “Mx. Claus” for Christmas and a person with a mustache wearing a bridal veil. And then there’s the man and gender-neutral person feeding a baby—where, until recently, the only option was a woman. That was <a href="https://www.unicode.org/L2/L2019/19336r-people-feeding-baby-emoji.pdf">Daniel’s doing</a>. She’s behind many of the most-anticipated <a href="https://blog.emojipedia.org/117-new-emojis-in-final-list-for-2020/">emoji of 2020</a>, including “ninja,” “people hugging,” and “smiling face with tear,” but this one was especially close to her heart. “You don’t need a boob to feed a baby or to take care of a baby, and so this felt like a reasonable resolution,” she says.</p><p>Djenar argues that the creation of that emoji both reflects and creates an evolving reality of gender roles in our society. “This is a very intimate interaction; what we observe has been happening socially spurs people to create more emoji,” she says. And those available emoji in turn open the way for what’s possible—like a father taking on parenting responsibilities.</p><p>The ramifications of our new emoji language may be even greater than that. Danesi argues that our use of visual writing is having radical effects on our literacy and cognition. Until recently, our collective way of thinking has been inextricably linked with the printed word, he says—our arguments, meditations, discussions laid out sequentially, reflecting what’s sometimes called the alphabet principle. “Our mind, our eyes, got used to seeing knowledge literally laid out this way in front of us.”</p><p>Today, that way of thinking and processing is still there, Danesi says, “but it’s not enough for us anymore.” Instead, we insert imagery, graphs, symbols. He sees this not as a loss of cognition but an expansion of it. “It doesn’t mean our attention span has gone down in any way whatsoever. But there are different emphases in the way we lay out knowledge, the way we create. Emoji are just a small symptom of this paradigm shift.”</p><p>Danesi’s old teacher, Marshall McLuhan, once theorized when we changed from an oral culture to a writing culture, that led to a change in cognition and consciousness. To Danesi, emoji represent a similar step. “It’s not just a cute new way to embellish your writing,” he says. “We’re retrieving an old pictograph society”—one that can use an image of a flame to imply a whole constellation of changing language: that’s hot, that’s lit, that’s straight fire.</p></div>
  

  
      

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Image Credit: Thomas James Caldwell, Flickr

<p>We use emoji in texts and other messaging to set a tone, maintain relationships, and show solidarity. But are they also changing the way we think?</p>

The evolving, unexpected power of the emoji





  
      <div class="rich-text"><p>Once you’ve seen a slime mold—its gooey, delicately branching structure oozing in a vaguely unsettling way along a log or leaf—you’re unlikely to forget it. They’re unmistakable because there’s nothing else quite like them. </p><p>Slime molds branched off from the evolutionary tree before animals split from plants and fungi. And they don’t quite fit into any other group: Some live as individual cells but come together and work as a group when conditions are right. Others are huge single-celled organisms that can grow to be several feet across and contain thousands (sometimes millions!) of nuclei with no membrane between them.</p><p><i>Physarum polycephalum</i> is perhaps the best-known slime mold, thanks to its distinctive bright yellow color and the fact that it’s easy to grow in a lab—and much of what we know about slime molds comes from research with <i>Physarum</i>. “I think they’re quite beautiful, really,” says ecologist and entomologist <a href="https://www.sydney.edu.au/science/about/our-people/academic-staff/tanya-latty.html">Tanya Latty</a>, who has worked with slime molds extensively in her Sydney, Australia, laboratory, of <i>Physarum</i> and its compatriots. “They have these lovely patterns of veins, a fractal look to them.” She even likes the way they smell—vaguely fruity. </p></div>
  

  
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      <div class="rich-text"><p>Latty refers to them affectionately as “little slimy aliens.” And those aliens are everywhere. There are at least 900 species of slime mold in the world, some with colorful nicknames, like ‘dog vomit’ and ‘witch’s butter.&#x27; They love wet, temperate forests but live just about anywhere, including in huge numbers in soil. </p><p>Much of slime mold research has its roots in Japan, in part because <a href="https://www.popsci.com/emperors-love-slime-mold/">Emperor Hirohito</a> himself was a biologist who loved slime molds and even discovered a new species. While we still know little about how slime molds behave in the wild, lab research has turned up some surprising things about their capacity to do, well, anything at all. <i>Physarum</i> and other so-called “acellular slime molds” (named for their many free-floating nuclei) are super gross, super cool organisms with no brain or nervous system—yet seem somehow capable of learning and making choices. Read on for a list of eight of their slime mold superpowers.</p></div>
  

  
      <div class="rich-text"><h3><b>1 .They can smell food</b></h3><p>We humans have receptors in our noses that detect chemicals wafting off of food into the air. Slime molds have almost the same thing: receptors all over their cell body that detect chemical cues that tell them food is nearby.</p><p>And it doesn’t stop there. A slime mold actually has many different types of receptors, each attuned to a different cue in its environment, such as moisture or pH. They can even detect light using photoreceptors similar to those in our eyes. That means that even though it is a single cell, a slime mold has something akin to eyes and a nose. </p><h3><b>2. They can pulsate their way to that food</b></h3><p>Here’s where things get gross—and cool—thanks to a transportation system not really found anywhere else in nature.</p><p>Within the blob of a slime mold sits a network of veins. Long proteins encircle those veins, and crowds of nuclei stream through them in a thick goo called “protoplasm.” The proteins squeeze and relax, pushing the protoplasm through the veins to the “growth front” of the slime mold, or the part that’s moving forward.</p><p>The sensory receptors on a slime mold’s surface are constantly pulsing in response to the signals they’re receiving, and this rhythm creates that flowing ooze. Once a receptor detects food, it starts pulsing faster. And since the inside of a slime mold is essentially one big fluid dynamics experiment, when the pulses quicken, the protoplasm starts to flow in the direction of the food—and the slime mold follows. That means a slime mold is totally decentralized: no brain, no problem.</p>
            <figure class="richtext-image full-width"><img alt="Edge of a yellow slime mold" class="richtext-image full-width" height="533" width="800"
            src="https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/media/images/Physarum_growth_front.width-800.jpg"/><figcaption><p>Close-up view of a growth front of a<i> Physarum polycephalum</i> slime mold. Image Credit: Norbert Hülsmann, Flickr<br/></p><div class="credit"></div></figcaption>
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      <div class="rich-text"><h3><b>3. And they can devise the best route to their meals </b></h3><p>“That you can do experiments on something that looks like a brainless ball of mucus is incredible to me,” Latty says of slime mold science. “I find it fascinating that it can do anything at all.”</p><p>But, as it turns out, it can! If you put a slime mold in a maze and put oat flakes—one of its favorite foods—at the entrance and exit, it will slowly search the labyrinth until it finds the shortest path from one end to the other, allowing it to munch on both snacks at once. It can perform much more complicated versions of this task, as well, in one case connecting 37 different points. (Note that the number of possible ways to connect 37 points is somewhere in the neighborhood of an eight, followed by 54 zeros. That is quite the oozy calculator.)</p><p>In a famous experiment, researcher <a href="http://www.cris.hokudai.ac.jp/cris/en/research/ob/ob_innovative/nakagaki.html">Toshiyuki Nakagaki</a> and his team gave their slime mold a real-world problem: Find the most efficient transportation network in the greater Tokyo area. Arranging oat flakes to represent key towns and cities, they put their slime mold in the center where Tokyo would be. The result <a href="https://www.wired.com/2010/01/slime-mold-grows-network-just-like-tokyo-rail-system/">looked an awful lot like the actual Tokyo rail</a> system.</p><h3><b>4. They can re-form if they get torn apart</b></h3><p>One of the genius elements of a slime mold is its protoplasm. Each tiny bit is interchangeable, meaning that every individual protoplasm unit can become a vein or a pseudopod—the temporary, limb-like projections that extend out in the direction the slime mold is moving—or any other part of a slime mold. That is, except for its organelles, which seem to be fixed as one thing, even as they slosh around inside the slime mold.</p><p>That’s why it was possible for a team of <a href="https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Hans-Guenther_Doebereiner">researchers in Germany</a> to shred slime molds into thousands of tiny fragments—only to watch those bits slowly join back together. Compared to other single-celled organisms, slime molds barely have membranes at all, Latty says. “It’s just this flowing gooey stuff that happens to stick together. So if you cut one into two bits and put them near each other, they just flow together again.”</p><p>So can you kill a slime mold? It’s hard to say. There’s a beetle that eats slime molds, and a handful of other slime mold predators, but “we don’t know if they eat enough of the body to make a difference,” she says. “You could lose half of the biomass, and it wouldn’t matter. It would just reorganize itself and be like, ‘I’m fine!’”</p></div>
  

  
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      <div class="rich-text"><h3><b>5. They can choose a healthy diet</b></h3><p>In her research, Latty found that slime molds will move toward a substance like sugar and will also move away from substances like salt. But was this just a response to stimuli, or something else?</p><p>Answering this question proved complicated. “When I design an experiment for a bee, I know that it can smell, what range of colors it can see, and to work with a particular behavior,” she says. But slime molds’ worlds are profoundly different than ours. “Something that’s amoeboid, can be cut up into little bits, and you have no idea what its perceptual reality is—that’s difficult to design for.”</p><p>To learn more about slime mold nutrition, Latty helped her colleague <a href="http://dussutou.free.fr/">Audrey Dussutour</a> presented <i>Physarum</i> with 35 recipes made of different ratios of the elements it needs to survive, protein and sugar, creating a kind of slime mold creme brulee. They found that slime molds will avoid food sources that will harm them and prioritize food that will help them.</p><p>And not only that, but slime molds can also stretch out tendrils to feed on more than one food source at a time—and do so in the right ratio, so that they receive optimum nutrition. “It’s not just getting protein or carbohydrates, they try to get a particular balance,” Latty says. While animals might balance their nutrition by switching up what they’re eating, slime molds divide their biomass over the food so they’re taking what they need from each.</p>
            <figure class="richtext-image full-width"><img alt="Reddish slime mold beads on log" class="richtext-image full-width" height="533" width="800"
            src="https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/media/images/Carnival_candy_slime_mold.width-800.jpg"/><figcaption><p>Carnival candy slime mold (<i>Arcyria denudata</i>). Image Credit: Mary Keim, Flickr<br/></p><div class="credit"></div></figcaption>
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            <p>In another of Latty’s favorite studies, she looked at how slime molds make tradeoffs between quality and risk when it comes to their meals. In that experiment, the slime mold had to choose between high-quality food in bright light (which slime molds don’t like) and lower-quality food in darkness. Then she and her colleagues changed up the choices—in some cases having the slime mold choose between very similar foods in light and dark, and in others creating more contrast. </p><p>“If you’re a basic system, you’d expect you always choose one,” she says. “You have a simple rule that always works. If you’re sophisticated, you get some information about quality of food and intensity of light and do some calculations to figure out if it’s worth it.” Latty’s slime molds fell definitively in the latter category: They were much more likely to venture into the light if the food quality was five times better than the one in the dark. “That implies slime molds are able to process information between two different attributes of a food source, which seems like a pretty sophisticated thing for, well, mucus,” she says.</p><h3><b>6. They can “remember” where they’ve been, by leaving themselves gross, slimy breadcrumbs</b></h3><p>Another study that Latty helped her colleague <a href="https://chrisrreid.wordpress.com/">Chris Reid</a> complete found that, in searching for food, slime molds rarely retrace their steps. Could they remember where they’d been? The answer was written in slime—like the stuff that slugs leave behind. Just as ants leave trails of pheromones to show where they’ve found food, this slime is a form of “external memory” that tells the slime mold: search elsewhere. </p><p>Realizing that slime molds could functionally “remember” things without a brain changed Latty’s perspective on many life-forms’ capacities to interact with their environment. “It opened my eyes to the fact that <a href="https://www.quantamagazine.org/the-thoughts-of-a-spiderweb-20170523/">brains are not the be-all-end-all</a> of behavior,” she says.</p><p>And that has big implications for lots of small organisms. “Slime molds are good representatives because they’re big enough and easy enough to work with. We don’t know if they’re the oddballs. I suspect not.”</p><h3><b>7. They can “get used to” situations and remember things even</b> <b><i>without</i></b><b> leaving a trail</b></h3><p>Many more advanced organisms are capable of habituation—that is, they can get used to difficult things in their environment, especially if they’re rewarded for it. But what about slime molds? Latty helped Dussutour set up an experiment in slime mold habituation for a slime that they christened “Blob.” They would put Blob on one side of a little bridge, food on the other, and coat the bridge with salt, which is unpleasant for Blob and its slimy compatriots, but not harmful.</p><p>Under normal circumstances, it would take an hour for a “control” slime mold to cross an unsalted bridge and claim its prize. The first day of Dussutour’s experiment, it took 10 hours for Blob to cross the salty version. The next day it took 8 hours. And the day after that it completed the journey in even less time—until eventually Blob could cross the salted bridge as fast as the control bridge. Blob had “gotten used to” salt! Dussutour repeated the experiment thousands of times and got the same results.</p><h3><b>8. They can teach their friends what they’ve learned</b></h3><p>After that, Dussutour started wondering whether a Blob that had learned to deal with salt could teach other Blobs the same. One key, gross fact here is that Blobs stick together—literally. If you take two slime molds and put them next to each other, they’ll combine. Their membranes fuse, they open up their insides, and their veins intertwine to create a new single organism.</p><p>Over time, the team found that if they let slime molds that had learned to tolerate salt socialize with slime molds that hadn’t for three hours, they would wind up with all slime molds that like salt. “It makes you think: What even is learning? Does this count?” Latty says. “It sits right there in that grey zone. It’s thought provoking.”</p></div>
  

  
      

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Slime molds are enormously diverse, coming in all sorts of colors, shapes, and textures. Image Credit: Melissa McMasters, Flickr

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      <div class="rich-text"><p>On Friday, August 28, actor Chadwick Boseman died at age 43 of colon cancer.</p><p>Perhaps best known for his role as King T’Challa in “Black Panther,” the actor starred in numerous other Avengers movies, “21 Bridges,” “Da 5 Bloods,” and a not-yet-released adaptation of “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom.” This “superstar run” of back-to-back productions “seems all the more miraculous in light of the knowledge that Boseman pulled it off while quietly undergoing many surgeries and rounds of chemotherapy,” David Sims<a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/culture/archive/2020/08/chadwick-boseman/615868/?utm_source=feed"> writes for The Atlantic</a>.</p><p>The cancer that killed Boseman is the second-leading cause of cancer deaths in the United States after lung cancer. And although the majority of colon cancer cases are found in older adults, rates are rising among young people.</p><p>In July 2019, University of Texas at Austin researchers reported that “the proportion of newly diagnosed colorectal patients under age 50 <a href="https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/cncr.32347">rose from 10 percent in 2004 to 12.2 percent in 2015</a>. Younger patients were also likely to have advanced cases more often than older patients,” Knvul Sheikh <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/31/health/colon-cancer-young.html">writes for the New York Times</a>. (Colorectal cancer includes illness in which tumors are present in the rectum or the colon.) According to the <a href="https://www.cancer.org/latest-news/colorectal-cancer-rates-rise-in-younger-adults.html">American Cancer Society</a>, about 18,000 people under 50 will be diagnosed with colon cancer in 2020.</p><p>Data from Canadian national cancer registries illustrate a similar trend in colorectal cancer rates in younger adults. Colorectal cancer rates increased by 3.47% among Canadian men under age 50 between 2006 and 2015, and by 4.4% among Canadian women under age 50 from 2010 to 2015.</p>
            <figure class="richtext-image full-width"><img alt="Sessile_Serrated_Polyps.jpg" class="richtext-image full-width" height="450" width="800"
            src="https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/media/images/Sessile_Serrated_Polyps.width-800.jpg"/><figcaption><p>Micrograph of a colorectal sessile serrated lesion, which is most commonly seen in the cecum and ascending colon, and has the potential to lead to colorectal cancer. Image credit: Nephron, Wikimedia Commons</p><div class="credit"></div></figcaption>
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            <p>While older patients undergo regular screenings like colonoscopies, which help flag the disease in its early stages so that doctors can remove polyps before cancer develops (colorectal cancer rates have been declining among people over 65, likely because of more regular screenings), neither younger adults nor their healthcare providers are actively on the hunt for colon cancer, Kat Eschner<a href="https://www.popsci.com/story/health/colon-cancer-young-people/"> reports for Popular Science</a>. Therefore, younger patients are often diagnosed at the later stages of the disease and are more likely to die from their illness, whether or not their cancer is more aggressive than an older patient’s.</p><p>Experts aren’t yet sure why colon cancer rates are increasing among younger Americans and Canadians, but lifestyle changes may be a contributor. “Obesity and sedentary lifestyles, for example, are linked to colorectal cancer, as are poor diets low in fiber,” Sheikh writes. But experts are not entirely convinced these are the only factors at work. Trends in obesity among people of different ethnic and racial backgrounds don’t always correspond to an increase in colorectal cancer, Rebecca Siegel, an epidemiologist at the American Cancer Society Patients, told Sheikh.</p><p>Patients with <a href="https://www.gastrojournal.org/article/S0016-5085(11)00170-3/fulltext?referrer=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov%2F">chronic inflammation</a> or <a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5392343/">Type 2 diabetes</a> have also been found to be at increased risk for colon cancer. According to the National Institutes of Health, because of genetic traits, insulin resistance, and the prevalence of obesity—explained at least in part by<a href="https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/article/racism-stress-covid-allostatic-load/"> systematic racism and allostatic load</a>—African Americans have a<a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1743410/"> high risk for type 2 diabetes</a>.</p></div>
  

  
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      <div class="rich-text"><p>As a Black man, Boseman belonged to the demographic of people who have the highest rates of colorectal cancer. In another major healthcare inequity, African Americans, particularly men, are more likely to be diagnosed at a younger age relative to other diagnoses, Eschner writes for Popular Science. And Black Americans are less likely to be screened early and are more likely to die of the disease, research <a href="https://www.asge.org/docs/default-source/education/practice_guidelines/piis0016510717318059.pdf?sfvrsn=0">shows</a>.</p><p>At the Center for Young Onset Colorectal Cancer at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, which was opened in 2018 to treat younger patients and study the reasons for their diagnoses, Co-Director Dr. Robin B. Mendelsohn and her colleagues “are exploring whether diet, medications like antibiotics, and the microbiome — which have all changed significantly for generations born in the 1960s and later — might be contributing to the cancer in younger people,” Pam Belluck<a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/29/health/colon-cancer-chadwick-boseman.html"> writes for the New York Times</a>.</p><p>As experts attempt to elucidate why colon cancer rates are increasing among young people, physicians should monitor their younger patients for symptoms that might suggest colorectal cancer, Nilofer Azad, a professor of gastrointestinal oncology at Johns Hopkins University, tells Popular Science. In this population, Eschner writes, symptoms like bloody stool, unexpected weight loss, and prolonged cramping can be overlooked or misdiagnosed as conditions like hemorrhoids.</p><p>Moving forward, better understanding and detection of colon cancer are crucial. But Boseman’s story and his legacy—an incredible collection of films created in a mere 7 years—also illustrate something else: a continued need to address systemic inequities in health care and beyond.</p></div>
  

  
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Chadwick Boseman speaks at the 2017 San Diego Comic Con International for "Black Panther." Boseman died of colon cancer on August 28, 2020 at age 43. Image credit: Gage Skidmore

<p>Colorectal cancer is the second-leading cause of cancer deaths in the United States. Boseman’s case illustrates the importance of more screening—and addressing systemic inequities in health care.</p>

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