Latest news with #Feltman
Scientific American
14-05-2025
- Health
- Scientific American
Declining MMR Vaccination Rates Make West Texas Outbreak a Threat to Measles Elimination
High vaccination rates eliminated measles in the U.S. An outbreak that began in West Texas is threatening to overturn that status. By , Lauren J. Young, Fonda Mwangi & Alex Sugiura Rachel Feltman: For Scientific American 's Science Quickly, I'm Rachel Feltman. More than 1,000 cases of measles have been confirmed in the U.S. since late January, including a cluster in West Texas that has caused one of the worst outbreaks in recent memory. These outbreaks are occurring even though measles was technically eliminated in the U.S. back in 2000. Here to explain what that means—and why that status could be at risk—is Lauren Young, associate editor for health and medicine at Scientific American. Lauren, thanks so much for coming on to chat with us today. On supporting science journalism If you're enjoying this article, consider supporting our award-winning journalism by subscribing. By purchasing a subscription you are helping to ensure the future of impactful stories about the discoveries and ideas shaping our world today. Lauren Young: No, thank you for having me. Feltman: So to refresh our listeners' memories could you give us a brief overview of the current measles outbreaks of concern? Young: Sure, so the situation continues to worsen in the U.S.; measles cases are continuing to rise. The current case count as of May 1 of the [Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's] report says 935 confirmed cases, which is growing at a pretty alarming rate. The initial outbreak began in West Texas, and now it's in 29 states, and we're also seeing cases and outbreak spread in Mexico and Canada. So it's important to note, too, that nearly 70 percent of the confirmed cases [in the U.S.] have been in younger people, ages 19 and below, and a large proportion of those cases are in unvaccinated people ... Feltman: Mm. Young: Which—and this is a concern 'cause measles is very highly contagious. It's known for, you know, spreading via cough. It's also known for creating a rash, which is pretty uncomfortable, coughing and runny nose, but it could also cause severe complications: it could open up people to pneumonia, organ failure and death. There've been three people who've died so far from these outbreaks, one adult and two children, and all three have been unvaccinated ... Feltman: Mm. Young: So it's definitely concerning. I know a lot of public health experts are keeping an eye on this and trying to understand, too, the public health response that's going on. Feltman: Sure, and just how abnormal is this compared to recent years? Young: Right, so every year we do see cases of measles, and this often happens primarily due to travel—so when someone goes abroad to a place where measles is more common, they'll come back and reintroduce, you know, some cases. But they're usually relatively contained. What we're seeing now is the highest number of cases since 2019, when we had a pretty large outbreak that started in New York. But, you know, experts are pretty much in agreement that the case counts right now probably are also underestimations. When these cases started in West Texas, for instance, it was highly concentrated in Gaines County, which is known to have a pretty high population of homeschool children. And so it's hard to understand fully the vaccination rates in kids, since, again, these outbreaks and the, the cases are highly concentrated in children, so yeah, public health experts are definitely keeping an eye on this and are concerned about what's gonna happen in the next few months, yeah. Feltman: Yeah, I think a lot of folks get confused about the statement that we hear a lot lately that measles has been 'eliminated' in the United States. Could you explain what that status means and how we got it? Young: Sure, so a disease gets 'elimination' status when its incidence is reduced to zero in a specific region for a set time frame. It's a little bit of a jargony, like, public health status thing, but the CDC and the World Health Organization define the status for measles as a period of 12 months with zero endemic cases, so that means there needs to be no continuous transmission of the disease over a 12-month period of time—so you can't link one case from another case. The United States achieved its elimination status of measles in 2000, and we've been able to keep that status primarily through prevention measures, particularly through vaccination. And, as we know, the measles, mumps and rubella vaccination, which is how you get vaccinated for measles, is pretty highly effective and very safe. Feltman: Yeah, do experts think that that elimination status is at risk right now? Young: Yeah, so there were a few prominent experts in the field of vaccine science who spoke out about this recently. Peter Marks, who was a former [Food and Drug Administration] official and he's a prominent vaccine expert,said he's worried that we're on the way to losing this status. Also Katherine Wells, who is the public health director in Texas, said in March during a news briefing that she's anticipating that this outbreak could go a year long ... Feltman: Mm. Young: So that would definitely be pushing into that 12-month window for achieving that elimination status. Feltman: As you mentioned, this isn't our first big outbreak since 2000, so what factors are coming together to put our elimination status at risk after, you know, 25 years of success? Young: Yeah, so there's a few things that seem to be, you know, folding into play based off of what I'm just hearing from the experts that I've talked to. One, for sure, is: we've been seeing kind of this steady decline in vaccination rates, specifically in kids but, you know, just nationally as well, ever since the pandemic. A big part of that was: during the pandemic itself a lot of children missed their well appointments, where they would get their routine vaccinations. We did see, you know, some increase from that, but there's other things at play. There's been a lot of anti-vaccine rhetoric that's been going on that's causing some of that increase to stagnate slightly, and, you know, experts are really highly concerned. We also have, you know, some public health officials in office right now who have a history of endorsing anti-vaccine rhetoric and are also endorsing studies to reevaluate things like autism and vaccines and that connection there. So there's just this heightened concern around vaccines. And when we see things like a decline in vaccination rates it's very important for a disease like measles because it is so highly contagious. And for something like measles we need to see, as some experts have explained to me, very highly uniform vaccine coverage—in other words, high 'herd immunity,' which is basically the level of either natural immunity or vaccination immunity you need to have in order to stop the spread of disease. So for measles you need about a 95 percent vaccination rate, and any sort of, you know, even slight decline in that can cause these severe outbreaks. So that's what we're seeing here, where, you know, we have a small pocketed community that had a lower vaccination rate and is, you know, spurring this particular outbreak. But we're seeing that also, too, in other places in the country where there might be even just a small dip in vaccination and it causes a disease to spread. And measles is kind of, as some experts have said, canary in a coal mine for vaccine-preventable diseases because it is so highly contagious, but if we continue to see this overall decrease in vaccinations for things like, you know, other eliminated diseases—like polio, for instance—that's also a little bit of concern for several experts. We did a whole story about this—Tara Haelle, one of our contributors, did a really deep dive on what that exactly would look like. So this is on the forefront of a lot of people's minds, just the general interplay between vaccine recommendations from public health officials and also how that's playing out from, you know, past historical trends. It's all kind of coalescing together. Feltman: Yeah, what do public health experts think we can do to keep measles from becoming endemic again? Young: It seems maybe like a little bit beating a dead horse, but getting vaccinated, you know, I think is still an important thing to do. Listening to trusted health practitioners about treatment. Being active about, you know, going to the hospital or going and getting treatment if you're seeing any signs or symptoms—which, again, include the rash, coughing, and the runny nose and watery eyes. Feltman: Lauren, thank you so much for coming on. Unfortunately, I'm sure this won't be the last time we talked to you about measles, but we really appreciate it. Young: No, thank you for having me. Feltman: That's all for today's episode. If you haven't already submitted your answers for the Science Quickly listener survey, go check it out at Your responses will help us steer the future of the show, and you might just win a fun prize for helping us out. We'll be back on Friday. Science Quickly is produced by me, Rachel Feltman, along with Fonda Mwangi, Kelso Harper, Naeem Amarsy and Jeff DelViscio. This episode was edited by Alex Sugiura. Shayna Posses and Aaron Shattuck fact-check our show. Our theme music was composed by Dominic Smith. Subscribe to Scientific American for more up-to-date and in-depth science news. For Scientific American, this is Rachel Feltman. See you next time!
Scientific American
09-05-2025
- Science
- Scientific American
The Only Particle Collider in the U.S. Will Be Replaced with an Upgrade
Rachel Feltman: For Scientific American 's Science Quickly, this is Rachel Feltman. Today we're taking you on another one of our Friday Fascination field trips with an auditory journey to Brookhaven National Laboratory. This Long Island facility boasts seven Nobel Prize–winning discoveries and more than 70 years of groundbreaking research into energy and the environment. Earlier this year the Science Quickly team visited Brookhaven to get a look at its Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider, or RHIC, which has been helping scientists study subatomic particles since 2000. RHIC's 25th year of operations is set to be its last—but only because something new is on the horizon: the Electron-Ion Collider [EIC], which scientists hope can reveal the secrets of the 'glue' that binds the building blocks of visible matter together. To guide us through these weighty subatomic topics, I chatted with Brookhaven's own Alex Jentsch. You'll notice that this episode's audio quality is lower than usual, but that's because we were hanging out next to giant science machines. If you want to see those incredible instruments for yourself—and get access to an extended version of my conversation with Alex—check out our YouTube channel for a video edition of today's episode. For now here's part of our chat at Brookhaven. On supporting science journalism If you're enjoying this article, consider supporting our award-winning journalism by subscribing. By purchasing a subscription you are helping to ensure the future of impactful stories about the discoveries and ideas shaping our world today. I'm here with scientist Alex Jentsch. Nice to meet you, Alex. Alex Jentsch: Nice to meet you, too, Rachel. Feltman: So where are we? What goes on here [laughs]? Jentsch: Well, right now we are in the experimental hall for the STAR experiment, which is one of the two operating experiments right now at the collider. Feltman: Mm-hmm. Jentsch: And this monstrosity behind us is basically just a very large digital camera that we use to take pictures of collisions of particles. Feltman: Wow, and what's the point of taking a picture of a collision of a particle? Jentsch: Well, the only way that we can really understand what's going on inside of the atom—or inside the nucleus of the atom, really—is by destroying it. And so basically you can imagine this digital camera taking a picture of a firecracker after it blew up and then trying to put it all back together. So it's basically the only tool we have to look inside the nucleus. Feltman: And what kind of stuff can we learn with that? Jentsch: Well, there's various different things. So the original reason that we built this facility and built this collider was to study the early universe, so we were actually trying to recreate stuff that would've existed right after the big bang. So we obviously can't go visit the big bang very easily, unless you're a Time Lord, and so ultimately the only way we can do this is by trying to recreate those conditions in the lab. So that was kind of the first main pillar of the science program, was looking at a situation where protons and neutrons were not protons and neutrons; they were actually melted into their constituents for a very short period of time. So we do that for very, very, very small amounts of time ... Feltman: Mm. Jentsch: In collisions in the middle of this detector. Alternatively, we can also look at just basic structure of the proton. We can understand things like its mass, its charge and its spin, which is kind of the esoteric aspect of a proton, but that's another thing we can do with this camera. Feltman: Cool. It would be great if you could just give us a quick overview of sort of the basic terms we need ... Jentsch: Sure. Feltman: To understand to wrap our heads around this. Jentsch: So atoms are already fairly complicated. So we learn in chemistry that atoms have these electrons zipping around the outside in this cloud. And then if you go deeper into the inside of the atom, you get to the core thing that we call the nucleus. So the nucleus is made up of these positively charged particles called protons and these neutral particles called neutrons. And for a long time we thought the electrons, the protons, the neutrons, they're fundamental. Well, then we looked deeper. We got new tools that we could use to probe deeper inside and found, 'Oh, there's stuff inside the proton and neutron. Dang it, that's more complicated now.' So we found these objects—we had no name for them yet; we didn't really expect them to be there. And one of the first things we had to figure out was what they're doing, what their properties are, how they're held together. They seem to be always bound up inside the protons and neutrons. So we start out calling these things quarks because we couldn't really figure out a name and we found something in a James Joyce novel that sounded like it matched the, the weird thing we found. And they're seemingly glued together inside the protons and neutrons. And we know that, from the electromagnetic force, that photons are kind of the force-carrying particle between charged items. Feltman: Mm. Jentsch: So electrons, protons, they see their electric force by being able to exchange a photon; there must be something similar for quarks. And so since they're kind of glued together, we thought, 'Okay, maybe this particle's called a gluon. Maybe it's the thing that's actually communicating this much stronger force than what we see for electromagnetism.' And so from all of that we learned that the, the strong force is actually much stronger than electromagnetism, it's communicated via this thing we call the gluon. And so all of a sudden a whole new branch of physics became a thing and is now why we build these new machines. Feltman: Quick follow-up: And what's the strong force [laughs]? Jentsch: So the strong nuclear force is actually what binds protons and neutrons together and eventually binds them inside of atoms together. 'Cause if you think about it, protons have positive charge, neutrons have no charge—how are the positive charge items holding themselves together into a nucleus? So the strong force allows the nucleus to actually hold together. Feltman: So can you walk me through what goes on when the accelerator's turned on? You know, what does an experiment entail? Jentsch: So the accelerator part is immensely complicated; it's actually a whole complex of accelerators. So you can picture it kind of like the entrance ramp onto a highway. So we start the cars off, you know, after a red light on the access road. They eventually get on the ramp, and then they get on the highway and speed up. Feltman: Right. Jentsch: That's kind of how the RHIC facility operates. RHIC is short for Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider—RHIC is easier to say. So RHIC is kind of like the highway, and then the other parts of the complex are like the access roads. Feltman: Mm. Jentsch: That part is a whole set of expertise and a whole lot of challenges, and getting the particles into RHIC is only half the battle. Once they're there they have to accelerate. So we have to basically accelerate them at the same time that we ramp up all of the over 1,000 magnets that are inside the ring. Feltman: Wow. Jentsch: So those ring magnets are being ramped up in their field at the same time that we're speeding the particles up really, really close to the speed of light. And then eventually our friends at the collider department use other magnets to force the two beams to collide at the center of our detector, and then we start working. So we're in a control room on the other side of this building. We turn on all of our detectors and start taking data, and that process goes on for about eight hours at a time. And so while we're in the control room, we babysit [laughs] all of the detectors, make sure the data-taking is going smoothly, and things always happen that we don't expect. And so we try not to run in the middle of summer, for example, because it gets hot and the power grid on Long Island [laughs] is not so happy with how much power we're drawing, and so eventually we get little dips, and that can shut things down for quite a while. So just getting the particles to the middle of the detector is really, really, really hard. Feltman: So what are some examples of findings that have taken place because of the work here at Brookhaven? Jentsch: So one of the initial things that was really interesting is that when we smashed these particles together, we originally started smashing gold ions together, and there was a reason for that. To recreate the early universe we want a lot of density and a lot of temperature. Feltman: Mm-hmm. Jentsch: And so by smashing heavy ions together the hope would be that in a very, very, very tiny nuclear scale you recreate the early universe—really, really, really small. And the thought was that when we do that the energy density becomes so high that the protons and neutrons 'melt.' Feltman: Mm-hmm. Jentsch: And you get what, originally, we thought was a gas of the quarks and gluons inside. That wasn't really what we ended up finding. We actually found that they don't really behave like a gas at all. They kind of behave like a liquid … Feltman: Mm. Jentsch: Which is really not something we expected. And so as we started to do more work and study different things about the properties of this quark-gluon plasma we created inside, a lot of it was not what we really expected it to be. So for example, we expected, because it might be a gas, that it would be fairly weakly interacting, which is not what you'd expect from the strong force, right? But it turns out it's actually quite strongly interacting—that's why it moves kind of like a fluid: all the particles actually kind of talk to each other. Feltman: Mm. Jentsch: And that has consequences for some of the things we try to measure. And so many of the things we initially measured were quite different from what we expected. As particles go through this plasma they lose energy. And so when we measure them in our detector they are not really behaving the way we originally thought they might. The other aspect of things that we try to study here is the, the basic, fundamental property of the proton ... Feltman: Mm-hmm. Jentsch: The spin. And a long time ago we found out that the proton spin is not just coming from the quarks; it's coming from some combination of the quarks and the gluons. Feltman: Mm-hmm. Jentsch: And so we actually made some of the first constraint measurements here at STAR and at PHENIX down the road that showed the amount of spin that could be coming from the gluons, and that was, like, a first-ever measurement. So now the goal is to figure out the last part, which is how the motion of the quarks and gluo ns contribute to the proton spin. So we can't answer all the questions with one facility, and so the hope would be that we can use the new facility, the Electron-Ion Collider, to start looking at that as well. Feltman: Yeah, well, and speaking of, you know, answering new questions, one of the reasons we're here is that this is sort of the end of the line for this version of the accelerator ... Jentsch: Mm-hmm. Feltman: As far as I understand it. Can you tell us a little bit about the transition that's happening? Jentsch: Yeahthis year we'll have our final data-taking for RHIC. And at that point we spend a couple of years taking all this stuff out because we have to make room for the new facility. And that process is really difficult 'cause you can see this is not a small piece of equipment. In parallel we'll also be retrofitting whole sections of the accelerator to build the components for the Electron-Ion Collider. So it's exciting—we're really ready for the new physics—but it's also bittersweet because a lot of us have been working on this for a long time. I've been working on STAR for, like, 13 years, and so I have fond memories of sitting in the control room with friends from all over the world eating, you know, really salty snacks to stay awake and drinking coffee. And that's gonna be, you know, going away at the end of this year, and we'll have quite a long time before we start taking data with the new facility. Feltman: Yeah, and what's the reason for the changeover? Jentsch: So the kinds of collisions we do right now are either gold smashing on gold or proton smashing on proton or even proton smashing on gold. The problem there is that you have two items that are full of quarks. Feltman: Mm. Jentsch: They're really complicated items, and as you speed 'em up to really high energy they get more complicated. And smashing two really complicated objects together means that trying to study it is not easy. Feltman: Yeah. Jentsch: By using electrons as one of the beams instead of another proton or an ion— so you have an electron smashing into an ion—the electron basically serves as a source of light. It serves as a source of photons. And so you can actually take, essentially, snapshots of the nuclei, of the protons. It's a cleaner collision environment. Feltman: Mm. Jentsch: You can't study everything that we study here—you can't study a quark-gluon plasma, for instance, 'cause you don't have the energy density of all those quarks together—but you can study what the nucleus really looks like at a very, very, very small scale. You can study what the nucleus might look like before it would've collided in RHIC. And so in some sense you can actually use the data we'll take 10 years from now to reanalyze data from now to try to understand more than we do now, which means we have to preserve [laughs] all the data that we've been taking for the last 25 years, and so there's a whole discussion now about the computing facility resources we're gonna need to store all of the data we've been taking … Feltman: Mm. Jentsch: Make sure it stays safe [laughs]. Feltman: Can you give me a sense of how much data has been collected in that time [laughs]? Jentsch: Right now we're collecting an average of something like 15 petabytes per year … Feltman: I don't even know what a petabyte is [laughs]. Jentsch: So a petabyte is—let's see; we're at terabytes—terabytes, gigabytes, so it's a, it's one million gigabytes. Feltman: Wow. Jentsch: And we're doing that now per year; it's gone up with each passing year. So when we first started taking data we were not taking so much data. The machine was at, you know, a much lower rate of collisions because we had to make sure the detector was safe, and computing power was not as good 25 years ago as it is now. So basically, as computing has caught up with what we wanna be able to do, we've increased the amount of data we take with each passing year to kind of make use of [laughs] all the computers we have available now. Feltman: Yeah. Jentsch: And so we've really stretched them to their max. Feltman: What kinds of questions are you most excited to try to answer with the EIC? Jentsch: So for me I'm probably interested in the stuff that's the less sexy aspects of the physics. I really wanna know the basic, fundamental aspects of the proton that we don't know. The proton mass, for example, it's a given; if you go into a chemistry textbook, there's a mass number there for the proton. But the quarks don't make up most of that mass. One percent of the mass of the proton comes from the quarks. Feltman: Mm. Jentsch: The rest of it is coming from the strong force itself, these interactions inside the proton. We still don't really understand how that works, and that's basic ... Feltman: Yeah, yeah. Jentsch: We know how much things weigh—we measure this all the time. Why don't we know how a proton gets the mass it has? Feltman: Yeah. Jentsch: So that's interesting to me. But then also even the proton spin. Spin is a less understood quantity, it's more esoteric, but we thought originally that this was coming just from the quarks. Then we learned that only about 30 percent comes from the quarks, so where the hell is the rest of it coming from? And so the EIC gives us the ability to combine data that we take at RHIC with the new data from the EIC and hopefully answer some of those questions. There's stuff that's more interesting to other people in the community, such as what happens when you take a nucleus of gold, for example, and you accelerate it near the speed of light? And now it's incredibly complicated—it's quarks, it's gluons, but it's many, many, many gluons. The question is: Does it just keep producing gluons infinitely? Or does it—at some point does that production cease? If it does the former, that's new physics; that's going outside of what we know from quantum mechanics. If it kind of saturates at some point, then that would be something we more or less would expect, but we don't know, and that's kind of studying something that's in the same ballpark as the quark-gluon plasma. It's basically a state of matter that is dominated by the strong force. To people who have been interested in the RHIC program this is probably the fundamental thing they wanna focus on, is the, the heavy ion part of it—the really crazy stuff that happens when you make a heavy ion go near the speed of light. Feltman: Yeah, and also very obvious question I should have started with: How big is it [laughs]? Jentsch: [Laughs] So this thing is a little bit bigger than a three-story house. Feltman: Wow. Jentsch: It weighs about 1,200 tons. The detector that will replace this for the EIC weighs a few hundred tons more. It's not small. And most of what you see that's heavy is iron. So there's a big magnet inside of this, and that magnet has to have a place for those magnetic fields to go ... Feltman: Mm-hmm. Jentsch: So we have iron to protect and remove all that magnetic field. And then we have lots of detectors, somewhere like 10 subdetectors inside, but they're made up of thousands of components. Feltman: When you're, like, talking to a member of the public and physics makes their head spin, what is your headline—like, 'This is why what we're doing is really cool and important'—for them? Jentsch: Well, we're made of protons and neutrons. Everything around us is made of protons,neutrons, electrons; they're fundamental. And we have an understanding of quite a bit of it—I mean, our chemistry textbooks and physics textbooks, there's a lot of information there. Feltman: Mm-hmm. Jentsch: But isn't it interesting to wanna understand how these things achieve their basic properties? We know they have an electric charge. We know they have a mass. At the end of the day it's a basic thing for human nature to try to understand the world around us. If we know we're made up of these things, we don't understand those things, it should be something that just drives our curiosity. Additionally, it's really cool to be able to study things from the early universe in a laboratory environment. And the fact that you have to build something this large to study something so small is also rather insane. Feltman: Yeah. Jentsch: So in and of itself this is just kind of a wild idea: that we have a machine this large to study something that we cannot see with the human eye. Feltman: Yeah. Jentsch: And so my, my hope would be that that is enough to drive someone toward a little bit of curiosity: You know, what are we made of? Why are we made of it? How does it have the properties it has? That's really what kind of drives me toward it. Feltman: Yeah, I think most people would agree that understanding the basic particles that make up literally everything is pretty important, so thanks so much for taking the time to tell us about it and show us around. Jentsch: Yeah, thanks for having me, and I hope to see you again in 10 years when we start taking data with the EIC. Feltman: That's all for today's episode, at least in the audio universe. If you want to hear—and see—more of what we learned at Brookhaven, check out the extended video version of this episode over on our YouTube channel. You'll find a link to that in our show notes. You'll also see a link to our listener survey, and I'd be so grateful if you could take a second to fill it out. We're looking for information about our listeners and their preferences so we can continue making Science Quickly the best it can possibly be. Go to to participate. If you submit your survey this month, you'll be entered to win some awesome Scientific American swag. Again, that's We'll be back on Monday with our usual science news roundup. Science Quickly is produced by me, Rachel Feltman, along with Fonda Mwangi, Kelso Harper, Naeem Amarsy and Jeff DelViscio. This episode was edited by Alex Sugiura. Shayna Posses and Aaron Shattuck fact-check our show. Our theme music was composed by Dominic Smith. Subscribe to Scientific American for more up-to-date and in-depth science news.
Scientific American
07-05-2025
- Health
- Scientific American
Fitness Doesn't Have to Be about Denial and Shame
Rachel Feltman: For Scientific American 's Science Quickly, I'm Rachel Feltman. Just to give you a heads-up, we'll be talking about physical fitness today. We'll touch on topics such as disordered eating and intentional weight loss. Social media is full of fitness influencers promising 'bikini bodies' and hawking fat-burning cardio routines, especially for women and femme-presenting people. But if you know where to look, you can find folks who are doing things differently: exercising slowly, lifting heavy and getting strong—a process that often involves fewer workouts and a lot more calories. One of the most popular figures in the femme lifting space is writer Casey Johnston. Her book A Physical Education: How I Escaped Diet Culture and Gained the Power of Lifting just came out, and she's here to tell us more about how strength training can change our relationship with fitness, body image and even our own minds. On supporting science journalism If you're enjoying this article, consider supporting our award-winning journalism by subscribing. By purchasing a subscription you are helping to ensure the future of impactful stories about the discoveries and ideas shaping our world today. Hey, thanks so much for coming on to chat. Casey Johnston: Hi, thanks for having me. Feltman: So I would love to start by asking: What misconceptions did you have about lifting and strength training before you got into it? Johnston: I think a lot of the same things that a lot of people have. I thought that if I started lifting weights, it would make me bulky instantly, and I thought it was only for people who really needed to be strong, like, in a professional way, like if you were an Olympic athlete or an NFL running back, or you have some sort of strength-oriented job. And the other misconception I had was that muscle is always just sort of there on your body, waiting for you to lose all of the body fat in order for the muscle to suddenly show through. And I didn't know that your body can sort of consume muscle or your—the amount of muscle in your body can fluctuate based on what you're doing and it is possible to diet too much, for instance, and lose muscle mass ... Feltman: Mm. Johnston: As you do that. Feltman: Yeah, so what changed your mind? Johnston: The big event in my life was that I found a post on Reddit where a woman was talking about her strength-training progress, and she was having what looked to me like a very sort of unusual to me at the time relationship with lifting ... Feltman: Mm. Johnson: Where she was only going a few days a week. She was eating a lot of food, and she wasn't that strong; she was, like, strength—she was clearly not the type of person that I thought of at the time as somebody who lifted weights. But she was having a great time. She was feeling so much better. She was enjoying eating. And what was most important to me at that time was she was getting these physical results that I had always been pursuing with all of my weight-loss activities, where she had lost some body fat and she was looking more, quote, unquote, 'toned,' as we might say. And after all my years of running and dieting—and I was putting so much into this, so many hours ... Feltman: Mm. Johnston: So much effort—I was like, 'What, what the heck?' that this lady is doing this with, you know, half the time investment, she's eating way more, she's committing all of these, quote, unquote, 'sins' that I thought were impossible for me to do as a woman in the world, and here she's doing them all. And not only is she doing them all, she's getting all of the results that I was never able to get. Feltman: Mm. So I've been following your work for a long time, but for listeners who aren't familiar with you yet could you tell us a little bit about the trajectory that followed after that? Johnston: Yeah, after that I decided I had to try this magical set of activities that I had no real awareness of before. And so I got into lifting weights, started eating more, and I was like, 'I feel like I've tried everything else. Nothing else is really clicking for me.' And pretty quickly I realized I love this style of workout. I love how I feel when I eat [laughs] and then when I go to the gym and I'm fed and I have all this energy and I can do my workouts and I'm getting stronger, like, steadily. It just felt incredible. And from that point, after I lifted a couple of years, I started writing a column about strength training for other people, an advice column called Ask a Swole Woman. That column has been published by a few outlets at this point, and then I started a newsletter based off of that column that was a little more expansive, and now here I am: I'm writing books and writing a newsletter and talking to you and all this good stuff. Feltman: You've done a lot of research on lifting, nutrition, fitness and diet culture in general. What things have you learned that have surprised you along the way? Johnston: I think the biggest surprise to me was: there were so many things about my existence before getting into lifting that I thought were just sort of par for the course of human existence, where you have cravings for food, but you have to, like, work really hard to deny them. You have to be always pursuing weight loss in order to be healthy. And I learned that not only are those things not true, but that constant sort of chronic dieting is bad for your body in the way that I—your muscle can be dieted away, and that can become a vicious cycle: the more muscle you lose, the less ability your body has to burn calories and maintain all of your sort of biological equilibrium and—but the harder you're going to try to lose weight because of that. Feltman: Mm. Johnston: So it can become this yo-yoing cycle. It's not just up and down in weight; it's that your body composition is changing in such a way that it makes it harder and harder to do each time ... Feltman: Mm. Johnston: Which is a little different than I had thought of things or how I was made to understand it, which is that, 'Oh, you lose weight, and then you gain the weight back.' It's like there's a more insidious cycle going on there. Feltman: Yeah. Johnston: The other thing I learned: I had these cravings, and I thought just denying cravings, having to work really hard to not eat food or to really want food, be thinking about food a lot but having to push it away was just part of how things are. Later I learned from this experiment the Minnesota starvation experiment is how it's colloquially known—where they put a bunch of men on a diet for a few months and found that, among other things, their mental state was very badly affected. They became really rigid, attached to rules, very fixated on food. And I found in my own experience that when I started eating more—not just, like, endlessly more but a modest amount more to support my lifting—that the cravings just went away. So much of the mental difficulty that I was experiencing was likely a downstream effect of not eating enough, not sort of taking basic care of myself, and I had never really made that connection between my mental state and the sort of input of food. Feltman: What do you think is missing or wrong in the way that most people frame fitness and wellness? Johnston: I think that there's a big emphasis on hard work ... Feltman: Mm. Johnston: Which is par for the course of American culture. It's sort of like: 'You earn everything that you deserve'—big quotes around all of this—'by working really hard, bearing down.' And sort of conversely: 'If you don't work hard for it, then you don't deserve it,' which is interesting because in our culture a lot of things come from different privileges [laughs] of different kinds. But laying that aside there's a lot of emphasis on—or at least, especially when I was getting into lifting—'no pain, no gain,' and 'sweat is your fat crying,' and these kinds of things that are focused on: if you're not enjoying it, if you're not in pain, you're not working hard, and you're not gonna get anything out of this ... Feltman: Mm. Johnston: That pain and suffering are one-to-one with 'results,' quote, unquote, and being deserving of the things that you're doing. And I subscribed to this ... Feltman: Mm. Johnston: With my running, where I was always pushing myself harder and harder, running farther and farther, eventually getting into half-marathons, hoping to sort of reach a point where everything was, like, a little more balanced, that I didn't even have to think about it all so much, and I only felt like I had to think about it more and more. When I got into lifting I found that the workouts were such that—there's a lot of emphasis in lifting on recovery. If you lift on one day, you need to rest enough the next day in order to be able to lift again the day after that. Your muscles are built in this time when you are resting, really; your body is sort of gathering its resources, repairing your muscles, making them a little bit stronger for the next time that you lift weights. So if you don't give your body those resources to repair the muscles, if you don't give it the time to repair them, it's a waste of a workout. Like, there's no point in lifting but not doing those things. So I had never thought of things that way—that all of these things could exist in balance—and that was not the emphasis that I had been taught about exercise. Feltman: What are some of the most interesting things you've learned about the human body over the course of doing this work? Johnston: I feel like I learned that there's so much more interplay between the brain and the body than I ever considered. I mean, it's—it feels, in one way, a bit silly to say because it's like, 'Obviously, your brain is part of your body; of course there's interplay. Your brain controls everything.' I learned that there's sort of messaging that goes back and forth between your muscles and your brain. Your body informs your thoughts in so many ways. There is some research that I got into while writing the book about the experience of interoception, how our almost unconscious processes in our body influence our feelings and our ability to perceive those feelings. A really good example is: let's say you get jump-scared online ... Feltman: Mm. Johnston: By one of those, like, creepy thing jumps out at you and screams. Before you even have the thoughts to interact your body is reacting: Your breath is quickening. Your heart increases. Your muscles tense up. This is all feedback that gets passed back to your brain and informs your emotional state, and over time that can become its own vicious cycle of—it's sort of how trauma happens—the interplay between your brain and your body and how you're able to perceive those signals, or in, in certain cases of trauma you learn to tune out your body because the signals are so threatening and you are kind of like, 'I'm not gonna survive unless I sort of push all of this away and down.' So reattuning to those signals is a whole process but one that I found lifting was super helpful with because it was this really focused almost practice in a way that I didn't think of, where it's asking, 'You did a rep, you did a set, you went to the gym, and you ate more—how did that feel? How does your body feel when that happens?' And I was so used to pushing away how my body felt and trying to tune it out, but in lifting all of that is necessary information that informs how you kind of do everything else in the gym. And that taught me to attune to my body in all of these other situations where my body is telling me something about how I feel and I need that information [laughs] in order to make decisions that are helpful to me. Feltman: Yeah. What advice do you have for people listening who think this all sounds interesting but, like, really don't know how to engage with strength training or, you know, get off the endless cardio train? Johnston: Well, I would say read my book because it will explain all of this. I think, genuinely, this book is for people who maybe have never known how to approach this stuff or even why you would bother with it if you're not somebody who is sort of oriented towards ... Feltman: Mm. Johnston: Sports already. It's like, 'What does physical activity and strength training, in particular, have to offer someone where that's not their thing, it's not their job?' There's a whole slew of things that are interesting, and even if you never put a foot through the door—I'm not trying to, like, indoctrinate anyone—but it's all good information to know and you can bring it into the rest of your life in lots of ways. But I have another book that's more specifically about getting into lifting, a beginner lifting program called Liftoff: Couch to Barbell, that's for people who have never lifted weights before. So you start with body weight and just stuff in your house, and it's very easy—starts easy and works you up to using weights. But in general I think it's worth acknowledging that it is difficult; a lot of us have unacknowledged history—hang-ups or issues or a lot of things that have affected us with our bodies that are difficult to unpack or confront. And so it's worth acknowledging that with yourself: that there's so much that we absorb over the course of our lives into our bodies and brains that are affecting how we think about this stuff. It's the marketing world that wants you to exist in this tension: 'Oh, it's simple, it's simple, and if you can't make it simple, there's something wrong with you.' There's not anything wrong with us; it's that our bodies need this consideration and space and time, and it's worth it because your body is literally where you live—you will never escape your body, and your body is not easy to ignore in the way that I often hoped that it would be, but once I was able to give it a little more room I found that there was this whole relationship with myself that I was missing out on. So I think these things aren't gonna come all at once, and so much of it is just about having curiosity and openness and focusing on your experience of these things and not what someone else says you should be doing. I have my suggestions, but they're just suggestions; it's take or leave. If it works for you, good. If it doesn't, something else might. But the whole thesis of this is that your physical experience matters—and not just in a abstract way but in a way that's very important to each of us. Feltman: Thank you so much for coming on to talk today. This has been great. Johnston: Yeah, thanks for having me. Feltman: That's all for today's episode. Don't forget to check out Casey's book A Physical Education. We'll be back on Friday to take an exclusive look at a particle collider. While I've got you I have just a quick favor to ask: We're running a listener survey to find out what people like about Science Quickly and what we might be able to improve. If you complete it this month, you'll be entered to win some sweet SciAm swag. Go to to help us out. We'll also include a link in this episode's show notes. Science Quickly is produced by me, Rachel Feltman, along with Fonda Mwangi, Kelso Harper, Naeem Amarsy and Jeff DelViscio. This episode was edited by Alex Sugiura. Shayna Posses and Aaron Shattuck fact-check our show. Our theme music was composed by Dominic Smith. Subscribe to Scientific American for more up-to-date and in-depth science news.
Scientific American
02-05-2025
- Science
- Scientific American
These Fungi Are Facing Extinction—Here's Why That Matters
Rachel Feltman: For Scientific American 's Science Quickly, I'm Rachel Feltman. Even if you don't know what the International Union for Conservation of Nature's Red List is off the top of your head, I can pretty much guarantee you've heard of it: the IUCN keeps tabs on the conservation status of living organisms all over the globe. Giant pandas are listed as vulnerable on the Red List, the Asian giant tortoise is marked as critically endangered, and lots of other charismatic megafauna have gotten not-so-honorable mentions, too. But the IUCN recently sounded the conservation alarm for some creatures many of us spend a lot less time thinking about: fungi. In March the IUCN announced that its experts had assessed 482 fungi species for the first time, bringing the Red List's fungal members up to 1,300. Around a third of those species are at risk of extinction. On supporting science journalism If you're enjoying this article, consider supporting our award-winning journalism by subscribing. By purchasing a subscription you are helping to ensure the future of impactful stories about the discoveries and ideas shaping our world today. Most folks don't care much about mushrooms or molds, which the IUCN says is a big problem. Today's guests will help us understand why. I'm joined by Gregory Mueller, chief scientist emeritus at the Chicago Botanic Garden and coordinator of fungal conservation programs for the IUCN, and Anders Dahlberg, a professor of mycology at the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences. Thank you both so much for coming on to talk today. Gregory Mueller: It's our pleasure. Anders Dahlberg: It is. It's really a pleasure. Feltman: So the IUCN is sounding the alarm for fungi. Gregory, I'll start with a question for you: Is this news surprising to mycologists? Mueller: I don't think it's very surprising for mycologists, but for the broader conservation community it is. For a long time it was assumed that fungi really didn't need to be a focus of conservation efforts because either they weren't in trouble or they existed in such a broad part of the world—they existed everywhere, each species—that if there's a problem in one place, it was fine in another ... Feltman: Mm. Mueller: And now we know that, like animals and plants, fungi have very discrete distributions, discrete habitat preferences, so if something's in trouble in one place, it probably is in trouble. Feltman: Mm, and, Anders, why do you think fungi have kind of gotten the short end of the stick from a, a conservation standpoint? Dahlberg: I think that most of the time they live [cryptically], they're not seen, [even] though we have an immense diversity of species of fungi in the world. And therefore they have been overlooked, they haven't been considered, although they are omnipresent and they are vital players for everything in how things are working in nature. So I think people have considered it difficult to handle the presence of species and to understand how—whether they are threatened or, or not. Feltman: And, Gregory, could you tell our listeners a little bit about why this kingdom of life is so important to protect? Mueller: Sure, so fungi play incredible ecological roles. They're nature's recyclers, so they're recyclers of dead organic material. Now, when that happens in your—back of your refrigerator, when there's rot in the orange or something back there, you don't like it, but in nature it's breaking down the wood, the dead leaves, everything like that, so really essential to recycle everything. Secondly, there are some that are important pathogens that cause disease of plants and some animals, but many of them also form critically important symbioses, mutualisms, that plants require to grow and thrive. And so without these fungi we just wouldn't have nature as we know it; it just wouldn't survive. And then on top of that there's all kind of economic reasons that fungi are important: for food, for medicines, and things like that. I like to say: life as we know it on this planet would not exist without fungi. Feltman: Could you give our listeners some examples of some of those symbiotic relationships? You know, what are some plants that would really be in trouble without fungi? Mueller: Sure, our pines, our oaks, all of those require a relationship with what we call mycorrhizal fungi. And so the mushroom that's growing through the ground, it absorbs water and nutrients and transports that to the roots of the tree. And in return the tree provides sugars that it makes through photosynthesis, passes down into the roots and into the fungus. So it's kind of a controlled parasitism, if you wanna say. But both partners require the other partner to survive and thrive. And those are some of our great edible species—chantrelles, boletes, things like that are also these mycorrhizal fungi. Dahlberg: And I think there is an addition to add to that as well: that these symbioses have been evolving since the very beginning, when the first plants started to come up to land 400, 500 million years ago. So in principle [nearly] every single plant all over the world have these symbiotic relationships and have evolved to take up nutrients from the soil and water through this symbiosis, a little bit like our microbiome in our stomach and intestines—it's working in the same way. Feltman: Hmm, so there are probably a lot of downstream effects of fungi struggling that we might not even be aware of yet. Dahlberg: Definitely, that there are, and they're exposed to the same stresses as animals and plants ... Feltman: Mm. Dahlberg: That when the habitats are changing, when we are more intensively [using] agricultural land or areas around towns or using the forests, that is affecting fungal species in the same—or similar ways as it does for animals and plants. Feltman: And what other kinds of threats are fungi facing? Dahlberg: So the main threats are sort of the changing habitats, that we humans are using the land, and that's nothing strange. I mean, I'm often saying that nature doesn't care, but we are caring. Nature—species are just adjusting to the prevailing conditions. Some are favored, others are disfavored, depending on how we manage our land. And then there are other threats besides the habitat use, of course. It's, like, the nitrogen deposition—that we are using the cars and engines and causing a lot of nitrogen that is enriching, making the soil and land more fertile—as well as the changing climate, the gradual change in the conditions for the plants upon which most fungi are dependent. And increasing the incidents of fire: so particular species that are restricted to certain habitats that are fire-prone are [subject] to disappear due to the increased incidents of fire, for example. Feltman: Gregory, what are you hoping to see change so that we can protect the world's fungi? Mueller: I think the first thing is a recognition that fungi need to be considered in conservation policy, in conservation actions and that they get the attention that they need. Feltman: Mm. Mueller: You know, to date, pretty much, they're out of sight, out of mind and are not being considered, and we—hopefully this raises that awareness that we need to be thinking about fungi, we need to be incorporating fungi in our actions. Feltman: Yeah. Mueller: I think part of the issue that people are always saying we can't do things about fungi is because there are so many of them that we don't know yet, right? Feltman: Mm. Mueller: There's about 160,000 described species, but there's an estimate of two to three million species. So you say, 'Oh, what do we know?' But I think what this study shows is that we know a lot, we know enough to be able to include fungi in our work, to recognize that fungi are in need of protection. And so yeah, we need a lot more work, we need a lot more information, but we know enough to do the work that needs to be done. Feltman: Hmm. Dahlberg: And, and I think also this: that things we, we don't see, it's difficult to know about, and it's even more difficult to appreciate such things, as cryptic fungi mostly are. And we really need to be aware of this cryptic organism in order to safeguard their existence if we want [to] for the future. Feltman: Yeah, well, my last question for both of you—mycology was my favorite subject as an undergrad, but I think most people don't spend much time thinking about fungi, so I would love to just ask you: What do you love about studying mycology? You know, what's something you wish the general public knew so that they could appreciate this kingdom more? Mueller: For me it's its diversity, the beauty. I got excited because we knew [such a] little bit about [it] but what we knew was so exciting—the fact that these are intimately associated with other organisms. So as a scientist I work with mutualistic organisms, so I need to be a mutualistic biologist: I need to work with my plant colleagues, I need to work with my animal colleagues, and so I can't work independently; I need to be thinking about the entire system to be able to do my work, and I find that very exciting. Dahlberg: It's really a fascinating life-form, and in a way it's sort of parallel to the animals—that they have the same ancestors, just two different branches. So in a way I look up on it as different [ways] of packaging DNA that are moving in space and time, where fungi have their way, with the mycelia, that may be short-lived or long-lived. They may be small; they may be extensively large. I mean, they can be like sort of plankton or they can be large at the—as this giant aspen, the, the Pando you have in Utah, for example. It's an immense variation in life-forms, in sizes and things like that. And that fascinates us, me particularly, to dwell into that, to better understand how they make their lives go around. Feltman: Well, thank you both so much for coming on to chat today. This has been great. Dahlberg: Thank you. Mueller: Thank you. Feltman: That's all for today's episode. We'll be back on Monday with our usual science news roundup. Science Quickly is produced by me, Rachel Feltman, along with Fonda Mwangi, Kelso Harper, Naeem Amarsy and Jeff DelViscio. This episode was edited by Alex Sugiura. Shayna Posses and Aaron Shattuck fact-check our show. Our theme music was composed by Dominic Smith. Subscribe to Scientific American for more up-to-date and in-depth science news. For Scientific American, this is Rachel Feltman. Have a great weekend!
Scientific American
30-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Scientific American
AI Offers Digital Immortality for Deceased Loved Ones—But Should It?
Rachel Feltman: For Scientific American 's Science Quickly, I'm Rachel Feltman. The idea of digital life after death is something science fiction has been exploring for ages. Back in 2013 a chilling episode of the hit show Black Mirror called 'Be Right Back' followed a grieving woman who came to rely on an imperfect AI copy of her dead partner. More recently the idea of digital copies of the deceased even made it into a comedy with Amazon Prime's show Upload. That shift from psychological horror to satire makes sense because in the decade or so between the premieres of those shows, the idea of preserving our dead with digital tools has become way less hypothetical. There's now a growing industry of what some experts call 'griefbots,' which offer AI-powered mimics of users' departed loved ones. But these services come with a whole host of ethical concerns—for both the living and the deceased. On supporting science journalism If you're enjoying this article, consider supporting our award-winning journalism by subscribing. By purchasing a subscription you are helping to ensure the future of impactful stories about the discoveries and ideas shaping our world today. My guest today is Katarzyna Nowaczyk-Basińska. She's a research fellow at the Leverhulme Center for the Future of Intelligence at the University of Cambridge. Her research explores how new technologies like these bots are reshaping our understanding of death, loss and grief. Thank you so much for coming on to chat today. Katarzyna Nowaczyk-Basińska: Thanks so much for having me. I'm super excited about this. Feltman: So how did you first get interested in studying, as you call them, 'griefbots' or 'deadbots'? Nowaczyk-Basińska: I'm always laughing that this topic has found me. It wasn't me who was searching for this particular topic; it was, rather, the other way around. When, I was still a student we were asked to prepare an assignment. I was studying media studies and with elements of art and performance, and the topic was very broad, simply 'body.' So I did my research, and I'm—I was looking for some inspiration, and that was the very first time I came across a website called and I was absolutely hooked by this idea that someone was offering me digital immortalization. It was almost a decade ago, and I thought, 'It's so creepy; it's fascinating at the same time. It's strange, and I really want to know more.' So I prepared that assignment, then I chose digital immortality as a subject for my master's, and master's evolved into Ph.D., and after 10 years [laughs] I'm still in this field working professionally on this topic. Feltman: Yeah, I imagine that the sort of technologies behind the idea of digital immortalization have changed a lot in 10 years. What kinds of advances are powering this field? Nowaczyk-Basińska: So actually, 10 years ago commercial companies sold promise ... Feltman: Mm. Nowaczyk-Basińska: And today we have a real product. So that's the big change. And we have generative AI that makes the whole thing possible. We have the whole know-how and technological infrastructure to make it happen. To create this kind of technology, to create your postmortem avatar, what you need is the combination of two things: huge amount of personal data and AI. And so if you want to create this avatar, you need to grant access to your personal data to the commercial company. And it means that you share your video recordings, your messages, your audio recordings, and then AI makes sense of it ... Feltman: Mm. Nowaczyk-Basińska: And [tries] to find links between different pieces of information and extrapolates the most possible answer you would give in a certain context. So obviously, when your postmortem avatar is speaking, it's just the, it's just the, the prediction of: 'How would that person react in this particular moment and in this particular context?' It's based on a very sophisticated calculation, and that's the whole magic behind this. Feltman: So what does this landscape look like right now? What kinds of products are people engaging with and how? Nowaczyk-Basińska: Mostly what's available on the market are postmortem avatars or griefbots or deadbots. We use these different names to cover, actually, the same type of technology: so virtual representation of yourself that can be used long after your biological death. I often use this phrase borrowed from Debra Bassett that we live in a moment when we can be biologically dead but at the same time virtually present and socially active. So there are many companies, mostly based in United States—and United States seems to be, like, the epicenter for incubating this idea and distributing this whole narrative around digital immortality across the world. So we have different start-ups and companies who offer this type of, of services, either in the form of bots or holograms. Feltman: And are we seeing any differences culturally in, in how different people are reacting to and engaging with these products? Nowaczyk-Basińska: So that's the main question that I am trying to pursue right now because I'm leading a project that is called 'Imaginaries of Immortality in the Age of AI: An Intercultural Analysis'. And in this project we try to understand how people from different cultural backgrounds perceive the idea of digital immortality, so Poland, India and China are our three selected countries for this research, because it's not enough to hear only a perspective and to know the perspective from the West and this dominant narrative. So we are still in the data-collection phase, so I can only share some observations, not yet findings. What we know for sure is that for experts and nonexperts that we work in these three locations—when I say experts I mean people who work at the intersection of death, technology, grief: so people representing very different fields and industries, like palliative care professionals, academics, people who work in funeral industries, spiritual leaders; so people who could help us understand what digital immortality may mean in this context. Feltman: Mm. Nowaczyk-Basińska: So definitely, what we know for sure [is] that digital immortality is perceived as a technology that can profoundly change the way we understand and we experience death and immortality. And experts agree on that we need much more discussion on this and we need much more ethical guardrails and framework that will help us to make sense of this new phenomenon, that we need much more [well-thought-out] regulations and responsible design. We also need protective mechanisms for users of these technologies because at the moment there is no such thing, and it might be surprising at the same time, super alarming. And also that we need collaboration, and we need collaboration because there is no such thing as in one expert in digital immortality, [one] person who can thoroughly address all the issues and dilemmas and questions. And we need shared expertise, or collective expertise, to better grasp all the challenges that we are facing at the moment. Feltman: Yeah, obviously this sounds like a really complex issue, but what would you say are some of the biggest and most pressing ethical concerns around this that we need to figure out? Nowaczyk-Basińska: So the list is pretty long, but I would say the most pressing issues are the question on consent. Because when you create postmortem avatar for yourself, so you are data donor, the situation seems to be pretty straightforward because if you do this, we can assume that you explicitly consent to use your personal data. But what about the situation when we have a third party engage in this situation? So what if I would like to create a postmortem avatar of my mother? Do I have the right to share my private correspondence with her and to share this with the commercial company and let them make use of and reuse this material? And another variation on the question of consent is something that we called the 'principle of mutual consent.' We use this in the article that I co-authored with my colleague from CFI, Dr. Tomasz Hollanek. We introduced this idea because I think that we quite often lose sight of the fact that when we create postmortem avatar, it's not only about us ... Feltman: Hmm. Nowaczyk-Basińska: Because we are creating this for specific users, for the intended users of this technology, which is often our family and friends, and the thing is that they may not be ready to use them and they may not be so enthusiastic about this. For some people it can definitely bring comfort, but for others it can be additional emotional burden, so that's why we think we should be able to create a situation when different engaged parties will consent to be exposed to these technologies in the first place so they can decide whether they want to use these technologies in the long or short term. The other thing: data profit exploitation. Digital immortality is a part of commercial markets. We have the term 'digital afterlife industry,' which I think speaks volumes where we are. Ten years ago it was a niche—niche that has evolved into fully fledged industry: digital afterlife industry. Our postmortem relationships are definitely monetized, and we can imagine situations that commercial companies will go even further and will use these platforms, for example, to sell us products. And these griefbots can be a very sneaky product-placement space. So data profit exploitation, but also I think we should bear in mind that there are particularly vulnerable groups of potential users that, in my opinion, shouldn't be exposed to these technologies at all, like children, for example. Feltman: Hmm. Nowaczyk-Basińska: We don't have empirical-based research that could help us to understand how these technologies influence grieving process, but I think that in this particular case, we should act preemptively and protect the most vulnerable because I don't think children are ready to cope with grief or to go through grieving process being accompanied by AI…. Feltman: Hmm Nowaczyk-Basińska: and a griefbot of, I don't know, their parents. It may be devastating and really hard to cope with. Feltman: Yeah, absolutely. We've talked about the obvious ethical concerns. Do we know anything or do you have any personal thoughts about whether there could be benefits to technologies like these? Nowaczyk-Basińska: I think they could serve as a form of interactive archives. It's very risky to use them in a grieving process, but when we put them in different context, as a source of knowledge, I think that's a potential ... Feltman: Mm. Nowaczyk-Basińska: Positive use of this technology: so that we can learn from some scientists that were immortalized through this technology. Feltman: Sure, and maybe even in personal use, less like, 'Oh, this is my grandmother who I can now have personal conversations with while grieving,' and more like, 'Oh, you can go ask your great-grandmother about her childhood in more of a, like, family history kind of way.' Does that make sense? Nowaczyk-Basińska: Yes, absolutely, absolutely. So to,to change the accents and to not necessarily focus on grieving process, which is a very risky thing, but rather try to build archives ... Feltman: Mm. Nowaczyk-Basińska: And new sources of knowledge, accessible knowledge. Feltman: Yeah, very cool. What do you think is important for consumers to keep in mind if they're considering engaging with griefbots or deadbots? Nowaczyk-Basińska: So first of all, that it's not universal remedy. It works for some people, but it doesn't necessarily have to work the same way for me because I'm a different person, I go through the grieving process entirely different. So definitely, that's a very personal thing, and grief is also a very personal and intimate experience, so we should keep in mind that it's not for everyone. Second, that these technologies, [laughs] it's only technology. It's not on the other side. It's not your deceased loved one. It's a very sophisticated technology that impersonate this person. And also that this technology can be addictive—I mean that this technology is designed in a way to keep you engaged, and you can be quite easily manipulated. So I think commercial companies should ensure that users are aware of the fact that they contact with technology through, for example, disclaimers. But at the same time we see that we have very conflicting interests here because what commercial company wants is to engage us and, like, keep us in this [relationship]. Feltman: Thank you so much for coming on to talk through this with us. I'm really looking forward to seeing your future research on it. Nowaczyk-Basińska: Thank you so much for the invitation. It was pleasure. Feltman: That's all for today's episode. We'll be back on Friday to talk about why the world needs to start paying more attention to fungi. Science Quickly is produced by me, Rachel Feltman, along with Fonda Mwangi, Kelso Harper, Naeem Amarsy and Jeff DelViscio. This episode was edited by Alex Sugiura. Shayna Posses and Aaron Shattuck fact-check our show. Our theme music was composed by Dominic Smith. Subscribe to Scientific American for more up-to-date and in-depth science news.
