Science Friday - Electric Fish Communication, Science Crimes, Lighting Cave Art. August 13, 2021, Part 1

Episode Date: August 13, 2021

This Fish Is The Master Of The Poignant Pause When listening to a well-practiced speaker, like during a lecture, a political event or during a favorite public radio show, you may notice they use pauses for dramatic effect.  This type of nuance in communication may seem distinctly human, but we’re not the only species that takes advantage of pauses in speech to make a point. Enter the electric fish: It discharges electric pulses nearly constantly, which tells other fish basic identifying information. But when they want to alert other fish to something of high importance, they pause. These fish and their unique mode of communication has inspired researcher Bruce Carlson to study them for decades. This latest breakthrough in communication pauses sheds more light on the world of non-human communication, he tells SciFri producer Kathleen Davis.   Science Crimes: From Grave Robbers To An Icepick Surgeon Imagine a novel full of true crime thrillers, with just one twist: every crime in it was committed in the name of science. This is the premise of the new book The Icepick Surgeon, which covers the biggest scientific crimes in history, starting all the way back in Ancient Egypt. From Cleopatra to Thomas Edison, scientists have been responsible for some dastardly crimes throughout history. We’re talking grave robbing, torture, murder, espionage, and more. All of these crimes were committed in the name of research. So how do scientists lose sight of their humanity as they conduct their experiments? And what science crimes may be in our future? Author Sam Kean joins Ira to talk about the book.     Lighting Design For Your Paleolithic Cave In the modern world, you have dozens of options for illuminating your home. There’s floor lamps, table lamps, chandeliers, not to mention an overwhelming number of choices in light-bulbs. But in paleolithic times, once the sun went down, there were about three options for cave lighting—a fireplace, torches, and stone lamps that burned animal grease. In an article published in the academic journal PLOS One, a group of researchers described exploring a cave using reproductions of each type of flame. The goal was to collect data on the advantages, disadvantages, and optical properties of each type of light—both to better understand how cave artists may have worked, and to develop a 3D computer model that would let modern viewers experience cave paintings in a manner closer to that intended by ancient artists. Iñaki Intxaurbe, a student in the department of geology at the University of the Basque Country in Spain, talks about the research with SciFri’s Charles Bergquist, explaining what researchers are learning about Paleolithic cave paintings.   Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

This is Science Friday. I'm Iroflato. A bit later in the hour, we'll talk about what happens when the quest for knowledge takes scientists a bit too far from ancient Egypt to Thomas Edison. But first, when you're listening to a well-practiced speaker, maybe during a lecture or a political event, or even your favorite public radio show, you might notice that they'll take advantage of pauses in a sentence. This type of nuance in communication may seem distinctly human, but it turns out we're not the only species that takes advantage of pauses in communication to make a point.

Joining me now to tell us a little more about this is sci-fi producer Kathleen Davis. Hi, Kathleen. Well, hello there. Well, good pause in there. Tell me, a little bit more about the story you've brought us. So we know that lots of different types of creatures communicate with each other in different ways. But electric fish do something a little bit different. Are you familiar with electric fish?

Just a little bit. Are we talking here about electric eels? So we're talking specifically about electric fish, so more your traditional fish. But these fish discharge electric pulses pretty much constantly. And so these pulses tell other fish basic identifying information. And the thing is, when they want to alert other fish to something of high importance, they pause. They pause, huh? Yeah. So this study really piqued my interest, as you can tell. So I decided to go to the expert. Dr. Bruce Carlson is a professor of biology at Washington University in St. Louis,

and he has been studying electric fish for decades. Yeah, yeah, I've been studying these fish for over 20 years now. And what has originally captivated me and what still really intrigues me about these fish is the fact that they possess this entire sensory system, this entire world of communication that is totally foreign to us, that we have no direct access to ourselves. We cannot directly perceive electricity in the way these fish can. And it's fascinating to me to think that there is a sensory system out there and a mode of communication that we just can't access. Now, the electric fish that you studied most recently is known as the baby black whale. Is that right? Yeah, that's its common name.

Okay, great. And listeners can go on our website to see photos of this fish at ScienceFriiday.com slash electric fish. But give us your best physical description of this fish for people who are just listening. Well, I think its common name is a pretty good descriptor, the baby black whale. It kind of has the basic body shape of what you would expect from a whale, like kind of like a sperm. whale, I would say, but it's much, much smaller. And it varies from individual to individual, but they tend to vary from kind of a coppery color to a dark chocolate color. And you said that they're much smaller than whales. How small are we talking about? We're talking in the range of a few inches to maybe 10 inches or so. So this is a fish that uses electrical pulses. So at a baseline level,

how often do they discharge these pulses? For the most part, they're doing it constantly. Wow. If you go to one of these bodies of fresh water in Africa where these fish are found and you drop an electrode in the water and then you monitor the voltage on a computer or a silescope or you listen to it on an audio amplifier, you will hear clicks and pops all over the place.

These fish are just constantly ticking along. And we actually have a clip of one of these instances of you dropping an electrode in some water. Let's listen to that. Tell me what is going on in that audio clip. So what you're hearing there is multiple fish in the vicinity of the electrode that are all discharging their electric organ. So if you were just to listen to one isolated fish in an aquarium,

you would hear something like pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, and you can imagine you take five of those fish and put them into that same aquarium, it's suddenly going to get much more hectic. All their pops are going to be going to be going. at the same time and it's going to be a din of electricity. Well, you can imagine if you go into the wild and a spot where these fish are found in abundance, it's going to sound like a frying pan. Okay, interesting. So, you know, if you're looking at the baseline pulses for two fish, are those baseline pulses going to be the same, or are they going to be unique depending on the fish?

So the actual pulses themselves are unique for each fish. Okay. So if you look at the electrical waveform of these pulses of electricity, which is it's kind of like if you were to look at an EKG trace of your heartbeat. That's a pot of voltage over time. And every time that your heartbeats, there's a characteristic waveform, and it looks exactly the same from heartbeat to heartbeat to heartbeat. Well, it's like that for each fish. Every time a given fish discharges its electric organ, that electrical waveform looks the same from pulse to pulse to pulse. But it's slightly different. in other fish. And it's even more different between different sexes of the same species of fish. And it's even more different between different species of these fish. So that pulse,

the electrical waveform of that pulse, it carries identifying information about species, sex, reproductive status, dominant status, and possibly even individual identity. So if I'm a fish, an electric fish, and you are an electric fish, we would both have our baseline pulses, but they would be slightly different. Is that right? Exactly. So now let's talk about your recent research that showed that pauses play a role in communication between these fish. Tell me what you found in this study. Well, what we found is that recording from sensory neurons in these fish that respond to the electric communication signals of other fish, what we found is that when you repeatedly stimulate those neurons with stimuli that mimic the communication signals of another fish, their responses get weaker and weaker over. time. And what was required to kind of reset their sensitivity back to the baseline was to insert a long pause in this stimulation. And a pause of about one or two seconds or so was sufficient

to allow these neurons to recover back to their baseline level of sensitivity. And the really interesting thing we found is that this is also reflected in the fish's behavior. And even more interesting in this is that communicating fish, they seem to be exploiting this phenomenon in the brains of fish that are listening to them. So when these fish are housed together and actively communicating with each other, they're more likely to generate pauses during communication. And they're also more likely to produce especially informative communication signals right after a pause. And so what this suggests is that when two fish are communicating with each other, when one fish wants to have an especially strong impact on the other fish, it takes a brief pause, and then it hits it with an especially important communication signal.

Okay. So while, you know, as people, we may pause to make a point while we speak. It sounds like these fish are kind of doing the same thing. It's sort of that break in the equilibrium gets the attention of other fish. Is that right? Yeah, it's very similar. So we know some of the most effective public speakers out there are well known to make effective use of pauses during their public speaking. But we also know that this is something that we do subconsciously just in our normal everyday language interaction with each other. We tend to insert pauses into our ongoing speech and we tend to insert them right before words that have especially high information content or that might be surprising based on the context. And it seems that these fish are doing something very similar. And this mechanism operating in the brain of receivers, where it needs this reset to recover its baseline level of sensitivity, this exact same mechanism might be operating in humans and other animals as well. And that might explain why it is that we use these pauses in our communication system to emphasize the signals that come after the pause. Now, do you think that they are doing this consciously? There's no reason to assume that they're doing this consciously, and we don't need to assume this, because we know we do this unconsciously. We do this automatically in our everyday conversational speech.

And so there's no reason to think that a fish isn't doing likewise, that it's just doing what just comes naturally to it in communicating information. Now, I'm going to play a clip here of electric fish pulses, and you're going to be able to tell that there is a difference. throughout in terms of the speed in between the different pulses. So let's listen to that. Now, can you tell what is possibly being communicated by those pulses? Yeah, so that was a recording of a single fish, isolated in an aquarium. And so you could nicely hear the distinct pops. And we can't, we don't have a translator. You know, we can't translate in real time exactly what's being said. But what we do know is through lots of behavioral studies by my lab and many other labs, we've been able to relate the production of certain kinds

of patterns to different behavioral contexts. And we've been able to play back some of these patterns to fish to see how they respond behaviorally. And in doing that, we've been able to discover that some of these signals, they seem to communicate information such as, this is my territory, back off, or I'm aggressive, I'm going to go into attack, or I submit, you win, or I'm reproductively active and I'm looking for a mate. Now, as somebody who has studied this type of fish for so long, I would imagine that this is a pretty exciting discovery. But what does it tell you about what we still don't know about communication in the animal kingdom at large? Well, I think what it tells us is a lot of things

that we might take for granted as being uniquely human, especially when it comes to human language, which is certainly special compared to other animal communication systems, that it may not be special in any kind of binary way in which it's a quantum leap from animal communication systems to human language. Instead, it may be an amalgamation of various features that are found in a variety of animal communication systems that are brought together in a unique way. So this idea of pauses in communication,

these have been described in many different, animals, not just humans and not just our fish, but many species of animals. And I think the interesting thing that we discovered here is that that may have evolved across animal communication systems because it's an effective way for senders to have an impact on their recipients. It's an effective way to transmit this information. And by studying these fish, we were able to discover a pretty fundamental and basic neural mechanism that might be responsible for this. Well, this is fascinating stuff, and unfortunately we are out of time, but in the style of an electric fish, I would like to thank you for joining me today. Well, thank you for having me.

Dr. Bruce Carlson is a professor of biology at Washington University in St. Louis. And thank you, producer Kathleen Davis, with that pause that refreshes. This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flato. Imagine a novel full of true crime thrillers with just one. One twist. Every crime in it was committed in the name of science. This is the premise of the new book, The Ice Pick Surgeon, from author Sam Keen. From Cleopatra to Thomas Edison, scientists have been responsible for some dastardly crimes throughout history. We're talking grave robbery, torture, murder, espionized, and more. How do scientists lose sight of their humanity as they conduct their

experiments? And what science crimes may be in our future? Joining us, to talk about his newest release as Sam Keene, currently based in Washington, D.C. Welcome to Science Friday. Hi, thanks for having me. You know, I didn't think about Cleopatra as being a scientist either. I'm sure most of my listeners don't. How did she get into that realm? She was interested just in general things going on in medicine, in her court, stuff like that. Well, actually, she was interested in a lot of things, things like poisons. She was really interested in sort of the dark arts in general. But a question arose among doctors in her court when you can first tell a male from a female in the womb. And she came up with sort of a, allegedly, it came up with a very dastardly experiment to try to figure the answer to this question out. It involved forcibly impregnating her maid servants and then opening them up at different days to figure out when they could tell the sex of the baby in the womb.

I knew when I picked up the book and I looked at the cover and it said, ice pick surgeon, we were in for some interesting stories from what an ice pick does to your skull to other kinds of stuff. Yeah, I was really trying to look at a lot of different. I mean, basically it's a tour of the criminal arts, but through the lens of science, where scientists are committing these dastardly deeds in the name of science, in the pursuit of knowledge. And what really, I think, sort of fascinated me about these stories was that the pursuit of knowledge is usually a good thing. It's what drives scientists. It's a good thing, a good motivator.

But in some cases, the stories in the book show the people got so obsessed with the topic or idea. They just took things way, way too far, trampled ethical boundaries and often committed crimes in the name of science. Yeah, you do point that out in all the cases. You do have a little bit of a morality or an ethics lesson after the end of each chapter of your book about what was going on there. So let's get right into some of these. Do you have a favorite story? A few stories kind of stand out in my mind. The title story about the Ice Pick Surgeon, Walter Freeman, was one that stands out.

There's another story that I really enjoy about the so-called anatomy riots. Yeah, that was something. Go ahead with that one. Yeah, so this took place in the late 1700s. And essentially at the time, doctors needed bodies to dissect. They needed to figure out how the bodies put together. Their knowledge about the human body was fairly rudimentary, and they needed to know more details about it. Unfortunately, people just didn't donate their bodies to medicine back then.

There were societal and religious taboos against it. So doctors really struggled to find bodies, and essentially what they did is either robbed graves themselves or they had commerce with what were called resurrectionists or sack them up men, who would basically rob graves for them and get the bodies to them under the cover of night often. And eventually, especially because they were kind of focusing on poor people, minorities, immigrants, those were the groups that usually had their bodies stolen. And after a while, they frankly just got sick of it. And they started to riot.

And there were several riots, actually, in early American history. I think one historian encountered like 17 of them or something all over the country. It was pretty remarkable. But the one I focus on in the book took place in New York City in late 1700s where essentially a doctor was trying to dissect a body and some boys, some small street urchins were kind of peeking in the window going, ooh, ah, you know, a dead body. And the scientist was a little annoyed by this and pulled kind of a crass joke in that he started waving the dead person's arm at the boys and said something like, you know,

yoo-hoo, this is your mother, I just dug her up. And unfortunately, one of the boys had just lost his mother. And he ran home to the father, was sort of crying about this. The father heard this, marched out to his late wife's grave, started digging, and found nothing inside her grave. And he was apparently not the only one who was mad at. about this. So we started rounding people up. They got a few hundred people together, and they actually stormed the hospital. Some of the doctors fled. Another doctor hit up a chimney, and they took the bodies inside. The rioters took the bodies inside and dragged them out to the street, started reburying them, smashed all their equipment, and this basically kicked off a couple of pretty bad days of riots.

And one of the main characters who was doing a lot of the dissection and receiving bodies was somebody named Dr. Hunter. Tell us about him. Yeah, he was a really fascinating character. He was based in Scotland in the 1700s, 1800s, and essentially he was obsessed with dissecting bodies. And he did a lot of really groundbreaking research. And there's no question that if you just look at his science, he did some amazing stuff. But he did, again, sort of have interactions with the resurrectionists who were digging up bodies.

I think he personally dissected thousands in his life. So a lot of dealings with these people. But he also did some other things that even people at the time were sort of horrified by. And I think that's one of the things I kind of use in the book as a guideline for whether we can judge their actions as moral or not, is how people, his contemporaries, his peers reacted. And in this case, they were horrified because there was a giant, a man named Charles Byrne. Some tabloids then said he was eight feet tall. It was very, very tall.

He would go around exhibiting himself. And Hunter got obsessed with getting Burns' body and dissecting it and putting it on display. And he essentially tricked, burns the people in his funeral, and got the body away from them. I don't want to spoil too much of it, but he essentially pulled some fast deeds on them and got the body away from them, stole it. And it's still in the museum to this day. So we're still dealing with the fallout of some of these issues even to this day. You can see the skeleton of that guy? I'm not sure if it's still actually on display.

or not, but yeah, it's definitely at the museum still. And you talk about the ethical considerations, because as you're writing your book, and I'm going to quote here, Hunter made dozens of anatomical discoveries, including the tear ducts and olfactory nerve. He oversaw the first artificial insemination in humans and pioneered the use of electricity from crude batteries to jumpstart the heart. He also, you know, he did all kinds of good stuff, but when you wade against all this other ethical morass he got into, It just doesn't hold up. Yeah, and his intentions were good, and he wanted to help people.

He wanted to make doctors better. He wanted to cure diseases. He was a medical reformer, medical education, stuff like that. But then, as you said, on the other side of the ledger were all of these kind of bad things he did, where he was tricking people to steal their bodies, digging up the bodies of people who did not want to be dug up and dissected. So, yeah, it's a really hard, ambiguous case to understand whether we should be. Think of him as someone who did good for the world or someone who did more bad than good. And you talk about that in terms of the Nazi atrocities committed on people in concentration camps and people captured by the Nazis,

the Mengala type of surgeries and experimentation where none of that could ever be used as a basis for scientific research. Yeah, I mean, a lot of the Nazi experiments were just plain sadistic or they were just trying to inflict pain on people. And there's really no medical basis for it. There's no scientific basis. And there's really nothing we can learn that's worthwhile from those experiments. So that's why a lot of that has been sort of, you know, buried and forgotten. And we don't really talk about it or reference it because there just was no good medical basis for it. One of my favorite stories in the book is something I have read about and written about over the years. And that is the works of Thomas Edison and the length of the length of, he went to to beat his business rival, George Westinghouse, going so far as to invent the first electric chair. Tell us this. This is a fascinating story. I'll have you sum it up, please. Yeah, so essentially Edison was involved in DC Current, Direct Current. And Direct Current can do a lot of great things. It's the basis of our computer, stuff like that. But it's not so good for transmitting

power over long distances. and Edison did not have the patents on AC power generating equipment. Those were mostly in the hands of his rival, Nikola Tesla, and his business rival, George Westinghouse. And Edison, you know, for all his great inventions, the phonograph, the light bulb that he developed with his team, all that stuff, his inventions really didn't make a lot of money. And he was very interested in making money. He wanted to fund his research lab, become sort of an American icon, this titan of business. and he decided that he had to beat Westinghouse and Tesla in the electricity generating game, essentially.

And so what he did was he started pulling all of these kind of dastardly stunts, where he would bring dogs on stage, and he would electrocute them with AC power to show that it was supposedly worse. Did the same thing with horses, cows, stuff like that. But then, as you said, he also got into the first up. electric chair. And there's one letter especially that I just found kind of fascinating where Edison actually early in his career was against the electric chair. His reasoning was that, you know, all people have potential and everyone can be redeemed and I don't want to snuff out the last chance someone might have to redeem themselves. But someone approached him about building an

electric chair in New York State. And I guess he saw a business opportunity in this because he wrote the guy a letter the first time and said, no, I'm not interested. Second time he came back after the guy pleaded a little bit, and Edison was getting beaten pretty badly in the market at this point. And he said, well, you know, maybe you've kind of convinced me, kind of changed my mind. And in fact, I'll help you out a little bit. I can point you to the best kind of equipment for this, which is built by George Westinghouse in Pittsburgh. So he very helpfully told him, told this, the man who was interested in building the electric chair, to go to his rival and to use eight. AC equipment in order to kill people with it, essentially to discredit George Westinghouse.

So Edison really had kind of a ruthless side to him that we don't often see in sort of the popular histories. And of course, his idea was if you could electrocute somebody with AC Current, imagine what it could do to you in your own home. Yeah, he had all these wild stories about how, even if you would touch like a brass doornaub or something, you would be shocked and you would die. And people were afraid to use keys in their houses. and then had AC power because he just told all these wild stories.

And essentially he was so popular and famous than newspapers would just reprint anything he said as if it were fact. Yeah. And in fact, one of his, I think it might have been one of his lawyers, one of his compatriots said, well, let's change the definition of electrocution and let's call it Westing Housing someone, just to make it even worse. Yeah, but they didn't have the word electrocute at the time. So they didn't know what to call death via electricity. So I believe a newspaper or something held a contest, and they asked people to write in. And there were some really great ones.

It was electrocus and Blitzentad and all these great names. But one of Edison's lawyers suggested they try to popularize the word Westinghouse in order to further discredit George Westinghouse, yeah. This is Science Friday from WNYC Studios. One of the most infamous medical chapters in American history is the Tuskegee syphilis study, where researchers found a black man who had syphilis and observed their symptoms for years and without offering them any treatment, even though penicillin was available, and maybe not even informing the patients that they had syphilis.

And you recount that in your book. Yeah, as you said, both of those things happened, where they did not give them penicillin, even when it became widely available. And yeah, in some cases, would not even tell them that they had syphilis. They would also lure them into the clinic with promises of free treatment for, they called it, the euphemism was bad blood if you had syphilis. They just said you had bad blood, and they would call them in for, you know, supposed special free treatment, they called it.

And once they got there, it was essentially a bait and switch. It was kind of like right out of a telemarketers scam book. They would say it's your last free chance. You have to come in this week. And once they had him in there, they would run tests on them. They would do extremely painful spinal taps on them. And really, really abused their trust and their power over these people. And it went on an incredibly long time, decades and decades and decades, until it finally got sort of exposed in the early 1970s.

One of even the most scandalous things about it that I talk about in the book is that the word exposed. isn't even really right because they weren't even hiding what they were doing. And that's kind of one of the more scandalous things is that they didn't really even think this was bad enough where they needed to hide what they were doing. They were publishing papers on this the entire time. And in fact, one doctor involved in the experiment, you write, was quoted as saying, my idea of heaven is unlimited syphilis and unlimited facilities to treat it. Yeah, and that is the point where I really think it just kind of I understood what was going on in their mind. They had stopped seeing them essentially as human beings where the goal of medicine is to cure people,

to help people. These people had essentially become biological petri dishes where they could run their experiments. And yeah, I mean, there are some sort of fascinating aspects of any disease. But when you lose picture of them as human beings, that is where I think it really kind of went off the rails. And did you find any commonality in all these stories about the point where the scientists lost the picture of people as human beings? Did it did you think about that? You know, what's going on at what point? Is there a breaking point or just a discontinuity? I think in most cases, they sort of broke bad slowly in that you just see them take steps by steps,

little compromises in each case. And I did try to kind of talk about the psychology, what they were thinking, how they lost their way. And one common thing I did notice was tunnel vision. That is one of the absolute big red flags when they are so focused on it that they basically lose track or lose sight of everything else, ethics and morals included. All they care about is getting the data, finishing the experiments. something like that. That becomes their overriding concern. I would want people to take away that these things did happen, but that if we really learn the stories and try to figure out what

happened, I think we can do better in the future. This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flato. We're talking to author Sam Keen about his fascinating, shall I call it gruesome, wonderfully gruesome, New book, The Ice Pick Surgeon, looking at some dastardly deeds of scientists. Any fascinating science crimes that did not make the cut. There was one in that it was definitely, would have fit in with these other rogues, no doubt. But it actually talked about it in an earlier book of mine, the violinist thumb, which deals with genetics. And that story involved a Soviet biologist in the 1920s, a man named Ivanov. And Ivanov was fascinated with the idea that human beings and chimpanzees and orangutans and such

had shared an ancestor in the not-too-distant past a few million years ago. And he wanted to explore this idea, wanted to kind of experiment on it. But the way that he decided to investigate this was he decided to actually mate an orangutang with a human being and just see what happens. And he got kind of alarmingly far in this experiment before even the people, like the sort of hard-boiled people in the Soviet Union said, no, we cannot cross this line and they shut him down. But that is an example of someone who is doing these kind of things.

that would have made the cut had I not put it in a different book. Let's talk about the book. Why write this book about the unsavory characters of science right now? Why is it relevant today? I think it's relevant for a couple of reasons. I guess I'd always been fascinated by true crime stuff and the idea, again, that you have someone doing something that in theory should be good, pursuing knowledge, but it gets twisted into this dark way.

And another thing I wanted to do was just make sure. that we are facing up to some of the things that science has in its past, the skeletons in its closet. And I think unquestionably, science has done much more good than harm in the world, both in curing diseases, new technologies, and even to me, kind of opening up kind of a spiritual aspect. I really think science changes the way you look at the world, and it makes you think the world's more amazing than it ever was before. So I love that aspect of science. But I do think we need to be honest that there were cases, usually isolated cases, where people did bad things. And I think it's better to face those things and to be honest about them, especially

because nowadays science is very powerful. And as we're moving forward, we probably will run into more and more of these ethical conflicts. And with the book, I was really trying to make sure that I was telling stories. They're all stories based with humans who did bad things. the victims, you get to have their perspective on these kind of things as well. Because I think when it's in a story form, it's much more powerful. When you're just talking about ethics in the abstract, that doesn't pack the punch the way that a story does. And so that's really what I was trying to do is tell these stories so that we have these

ethical strictures in mind going forward and can hopefully do better in the future. Well, we have some going on right now or in the recent past. You know, I'm talking about the CRISPR researcher in China editing two embryos, right? That wasn't so long ago. Yep, a few years ago, yeah. And, I mean, it's unfortunate that it happened. I was heartened to see, though, that you had basically the entire scientific community stepped forward and say, this was unacceptable.

They, the researcher did not get permission, did not discuss this with anyone else, did a bad job of it anyway. even Nobel Prize winners who had invented the technology were standing up and saying, absolutely not. We cannot do this in the future. So that was heartening to me to see that people are aware of these ethical considerations now and are taking them seriously. Do you think that artificial intelligence might show up one day to have a dark side to it and be maybe the subject of your next book? Yeah, maybe. Yeah, I hope there's not a sequel to this book. Yeah, so at the end of the book, actually, I have an appellate.

where I talk about the future of crime and how new technologies and things might enable wholly new types of crime in the future. So I focus specifically on space, colonizing space, and different crimes that could happen up in space. I talk about genetic engineering, things like CRISPR, and also artificial intelligence. And even nowadays, you can see glimmers where people talk about, you know, biases and algorithms, things like that. So we're already starting to even see some of these issues pop up. But if computers get exponentially more powerful than they are even now, we could see even bigger problems in the future, yeah. And what kind of crimes in space are you contemplating? Well, a lot of it has to do with just what is going to happen when humans do

bad things in space, because they'll be on maybe Mars or something like that. Are we going to send a police force up there to arrest someone. It's going to take over a year to get there. So do we have jurisdiction over, you know, people like that? What if it's a mix of people from all different countries around the world? Who's in charge of that? Or do we let them police themselves, which might not be fair, because if they have someone just sitting in a jail cell somewhere, that person's using oxygen. They're using food. That's very, very precious on another planet. So that doesn't seem fair to them either. And we really haven't hashed out what we're going to do when inevitably humans commit crimes in other places.

Or when humans commit more of these crimes, even here on Earth. I mean, it doesn't seem like there's any way to prevent it, does it? I don't think there's a way to prevent it, but that doesn't mean we can't at least think about it and try to minimize the harm. I think the bigger folly would be to say, well, we can't stop. it completely, so we'll just do nothing at all. I do think we, yeah, we can think about it and try to at least curb some of the worst aspects of it. Sam, we have run out of time. Excellent book, as always. Thank you. Sam Keen, author of the fascinating new book, The Ice Pick Surgeon. If you need something else to read, take this one to the beach with you. Thanks for joining us again, Sam.

Thanks for having me. For the rest of the hour, a look at lighting. Yeah, Syphreis Charles Burghwist is here to tell us why, Charles. Hey, Ira, what kind of lights do you have in your house? Well, of course, we've got the windows and some table lamps, floor lamps, maybe some recessed or track lighting, and of course your chandelier in the dining room. Okay, but if you were in a Paleolithic cave about 12,000 years ago or more, you didn't have that dining room chandelier. You probably had about three options for lighting your cave.

First was a fireplace, basically a regular campfire. Yeah, but that took a lot of light to make heat. We're not talking LCDs here. And campfires can be smoky, and the one thing about them is that they stay in place, right? Right. You're not carrying the campfire around. So for mobile lighting, you basically had a torch, either a big stick or a bundle of sticks. And then there was the Paleolithic Stone.

lamp. That was basically a flat stone with a hole in the middle. And you put animal grease or fat into that hole and some little twigs to make a wick for it. I get it. So you had your big, your medium, your little different fires for different uses. Right. And so recently scientists studying Paleolithic art went into the Achura Cave in northern Spain's Basque Country. And they brought reproductions of these different kinds of lights to try them out. They figured out that if you were a cave artist, you probably used a torch when you were trekking deep into that cave because a torch was bright, but they make a lot of smoke, so they aren't good for being in a confined space for a long time if you're painting something. And you know, that's what I was wondering about. How could they make

these paintings with a torch? As you say, sometimes they're deep in a cave in a pretty tight space. Yeah, not a place you'd want to hang out in a lot of smoke. So they used the torch to explore the cave, but then they switched to the oil lamp for their worklight. That stone oil lamp could burn for a long time without giving off a lot of smoke, but it only puts out about as much light as a candle. So you can imagine a cave artist painting just by the light of a flickering candle. Yeah, one candle. Okay, so why did scientists need to go into a cave? to figure this out.

So they were trying to get really accurate data on the specific properties of each of these kinds of lights in the cave. Stuff like how long it lasted, the color properties, how far you could see using that light. They're using all of that illumination data to make a 3D model of a cave with art, sort of like a high-resolution video game so that you could experience those cave paintings under realistic lighting conditions and maybe get a better sense of what the artists themselves experienced and intended. I asked in Yaki Inshariba, a PhD student in the Department of Geology at the University of

the Basque country in Spain, what it was like for him to go into that cave carrying an actual torch. First thing is that the colors that we appreciate are different. The five only It produced reddish colors. So we are going to see the landscape in yellow colors, in red color. It's going to be different. And the second thing is that the walls are going to be moving always, because the fire is always moving. So the sages are going to be moving.

They are going to be a lot of saddles. And the smoke also, the smoke also produce a different sensation. I don't know. The noise also because the fire is always producing noise, not? This type of sparks are these type of things. And when with the roots, for example, an area with paintings, the sensations are very magical because we are going to see a horse like we seem to be moving.

It's different to go, for example, to a cave with modern artificial electric torches and it's different. Do we know why they chose such an inconvenient place to make their art? I mean, wouldn't you do it where the light was better? This is the main question of our chef. We haven't got the answers yet, but perhaps I think that there could be two reasons, more or less. The first reason is that they want to find a place to put painting and which only could be seen by the ones that they want.

So this painting is not going to be seen for another person or another group or something like this. The second reason is that they didn't have in the mind a bison, for example, or a horse ship. The caves or a concrete wall is telling them to paint the horse or the bison. So if this wall is located close to the bison, the entrance, they are going to find the pison there close to the entrance. But if the wall is located in the deepest part of the cave, they are going to explore the entire cave until reaching this wall, and they are going to see, it's there, this magic wall, and they are going to paint there.

You're listening to Science Friday from WNYC Studios. I'm talking with Inaki Incherebe, part of a team who recently studied lighting in Paleolithic caves. Would the artist painting these pictures have been working by himself or herself, or did he have artist helpers holding lights for him?

I think that a lot of people know because there is not enough space for big groups, no? But it doesn't seems the work for a single person because it's very dangerous. You need different

artists, for example, we have seen that employing the palorific lights, they need more than 40 minutes to reach the areas we throw up. So we have seen that employing the torches that we have measured, they need at least two torches, one to enter the earth, and the other one to go again to the surface. So I think that two persons, minimal, yes, because it's very dangerous.

and one needs to be helping the other one to claim and things like that. Right. So today, when you or I see this art, we've got powerful work lights, we've got headlamps. Are we all getting the wrong impression of what this art means and how to experience this art? Absolutely. We have seen that if you ported, You were a torch, for example, the light of the fire is moving always. So the walls are going to be always moving, like in the cinema, more or less.

They are going to be different shadows. They are going to be different colors, different intensities. So perhaps they enter it in the cave, working in this type of lightings, and this is motivated to paint the animals, for example, because the cracks are moving, the shapes are moving also in the cave with the light of the flame. Currently, we use artificial light that are fixed, so we didn't appreciate this type of movement. But currently we are using also digital methods like video games, for example, like motor games. And this allows us to appreciate this type of scenario.

We model like the palolithic cave, for example, in a computer. We place different type of fires, for example, and things and that. So we can see how the wall is moving, how the natural shape are outstanding or not, and things like that. What do you see people misunderstand about paleolithic art? What do people get wrong, and you're just like, ah, no. People, if they think about palaeific art, they are going to imagine be animals, very, very beautiful, perhaps they are going to be a caveman painting this in the kitchen, but this is not a reality.

These type of paintings usually are in this magic space that we have been talking before, but they were not made to be... for aesthetics reasons. We call this palolithic art, but really we don't know if it's art because it's something more important than art. Inaki Incheriba is a PhD student in the Department of Geology

at the University of the Basque Country in Spain. Thank you so much for taking time to talk with me today. You're welcome. For Science Friday, I'm Charles Burkwist. Nice story, Charles. Thanks for bringing it. to us. Thanks, Ira. Always good to talk about caves. And that's about all the time we have for this hour. Charles Burkowitz is our director. Our producers are Christy Taylor and Kathleen Davis. Our intern is

Emily Zhang. John Dan Koski is our news director. Alexa Lim is our senior producer. And we bid a teary farewell to Alexa who has been part of our SciFry family for almost a decade. Alexa is a terrific producer and a caring comrade, and she has served as an anchor for our team for many, many years, not to mention the only person who could outdad my dad jokes. She will be missed. We wish her well. BJ Leiderman composed our theme music,

and if you missed any part of the program or you would like to hear it again, subscribe to our podcasts, or ask your smart speaker to play Science Friday. Of course, you can email us the old-fashioned way, SciFri at Science Friday.com. Have a great weekend. We'll see you next week. I'm Ira Flato.