Category: 7. Science

Immediately after the Big Bang, which occurred around 13.8 billion years ago, the universe was dominated by unimaginably high temperatures and densities. However, after just a few seconds, it had cooled down enough for the first elements to form, primarily hydrogen and helium. These were still completely ionized at this point, as it took almost 380,000 years for the temperature in the universe to drop enough for neutral atoms to form through recombination with free electrons. This paved the way for the first chemical reactions.

The oldest molecule in existence is the helium hydride ion (HeH⁺), formed from a neutral helium atom and an ionized hydrogen nucleus. This marks the beginning of a chain reaction that leads to the formation of molecular hydrogen (H2), which is by far the most common molecule in the universe.

Recombination was followed by the ‘dark age’ of cosmology: although the universe was now transparent due to the binding of free electrons, there were still no light-emitting objects, such as stars. Several hundred million years passed before the first stars formed.

During this early phase of the universe, however, simple molecules such as HeH⁺ and H2 were essential to the formation of the first stars. In order for the contracting gas cloud of a protostar to collapse to the point where nuclear fusion can begin, heat must be dissipated. This occurs through collisions that excite atoms and molecules, which then emit this energy in the form of photons. Below approximately 10,000 degrees Celsius, however, this process becomes ineffective for the dominant hydrogen atoms. Further cooling can only take place via molecules that can emit additional energy through rotation and vibration. Due to its pronounced dipole moment, the HeH⁺ ion is particularly effective at these low temperatures and has long been considered a potentially important candidate for cooling in the formation of the first stars. Consequently, the concentration of helium hydride ions in the universe may significantly impact the effectiveness of early star formation.

During this period, collisions with free hydrogen atoms were a major degradation pathway for HeH⁺, forming a neutral helium atom and an H2⁺ ion. These subsequently reacted with another H atom to form a neutral H2 molecule and a proton, leading to the formation of molecular hydrogen.

Researchers at the Max-Planck-Institut für Kernphysik (MPIK) in Heidelberg have now successfully recreated this reaction under conditions similar to those in the early universe for the first time. They investigated the reaction of HeH⁺ with deuterium, an isotope of hydrogen containing an additional neutron in the atomic nucleus alongside a proton. When HeH⁺ reacts with deuterium, an HD⁺ ion is formed instead of H2⁺, alongside the neutral helium atom.

The experiment was carried out at the Cryogenic Storage Ring (CSR) at the MPIK in Heidelberg — a globally unique instrument for investigating molecular and atomic reactions under space-like conditions. For this purpose, HeH⁺ ions were stored in the 35-metre-diameter ion storage ring for up to 60 seconds at a few kelvins (-267 °C), and were superimposed with a beam of neutral deuterium atoms. By adjusting the relative speeds of the two particle beams, the scientists were able to study how the collision rate varies with collision energy, which is directly related to temperature.

They found that, contrary to earlier predictions, the rate at which this reaction proceeds does not slow down with decreasing temperature, but remains almost constant. “Previous theories predicted a significant decrease in the reaction probability at low temperatures, but we were unable to verify this in either the experiment or new theoretical calculations by our colleagues,” explains Dr Holger Kreckel from the MPIK. ‘The reactions of HeH⁺ with neutral hydrogen and deuterium therefore appear to have been far more important for chemistry in the early universe than previously assumed,’ he continues. This observation is consistent with the findings of a group of theoretical physicists led by Yohann Scribano, who identified an error in the calculation of the potential surface used in all previous calculations for this reaction. The new calculations using the improved potential surface now align closely with the CSR experiment.

Since the concentrations of molecules such as HeH⁺ and molecular hydrogen (H2 or HD) played an important role in the formation of the first stars, this result brings us closer to solving the mystery of their formation.

A recent study published in Communications Earth & Environment provides a stark warning about the ocean’s future: the looming oxygen crisis may threaten key marine species, including the crucial lanternfish. Using over 10,000 years of fossil records, researchers have found that lanternfish populations drastically declined whenever oxygen levels in the ocean fell below a critical threshold. As ocean temperatures rise and oxygen levels drop, this loss of lanternfish could lead to cascading effects throughout marine ecosystems, disrupting food chains, carbon storage, and climate regulation. The study not only shines a light on the ecological importance of lanternfish but also provides critical insight into the potential future of our oceans.

The Ocean’s Breath: A Struggling Ecosystem in Crisis

The deep oceans are slowly losing their breath, and the marine species that inhabit these depths are beginning to feel the effects. Lanternfish, among the most abundant vertebrates in the ocean, are showing significant signs of stress as ocean deoxygenation progresses. These fish are not just a crucial part of marine biodiversity but also play an essential role in the Earth’s climate system. They contribute to the ocean’s biological pump, helping sequester carbon by shuttling it to deeper layers of the ocean, away from the atmosphere. But with oxygen levels plummeting, this vital process is under threat.

The research, which analyzed fossilized otoliths (ear bones) from the Aegean Sea, shows that lanternfish populations collapsed during periods of low oxygen. This pattern, revealed through a 10,000-year span, serves as a warning for what might happen in the future as climate change accelerates the warming and deoxygenation of oceans. The consequences of these shifts are not just ecological; they could have far-reaching effects on human societies that depend on seafood and healthy marine ecosystems. The study’s findings make it clear that the depletion of lanternfish populations would severely impact the entire food chain, ultimately destabilizing marine food webs that humans rely on.

Lanternfish: A Vital Link in Marine Ecosystems and Climate Regulation

Lanternfish are not just fascinating creatures with glowing bodies that light up the ocean depths—they are key players in the global carbon cycle. Each night, lanternfish perform a vital role in carbon sequestration, rising from depths of up to 2,600 feet to feed and then returning to the ocean’s twilight zone before sunrise. This migratory behavior helps transport carbon into deep ocean waters, where it remains stored for long periods. According to the study, their nightly rise moves roughly four gigatons of carbon downward each year, a process that helps mitigate climate change by reducing the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere.

However, this critical biological pump is at risk. With rising temperatures and the expansion of low-oxygen zones in the ocean, lanternfish may no longer be able to thrive in their traditional habitats. As oxygen-depleted waters rise and compress the safe depths for these fish, their populations may dwindle, leading to a breakdown of the biological pump. The repercussions would be profound, with a 25% reduction in the carbon exported to the depths of the ocean, accelerating atmospheric warming and creating a feedback loop that further diminishes ocean oxygen levels.

The Past as a Warning: How Historical Data Sheds Light on Future Risks

The study’s findings are not just based on modern observations but are grounded in a deep dive into the past. By analyzing sediment cores from the Aegean Sea, researchers were able to reconstruct a history of oxygen fluctuations over the past 10,000 years. The fossilized otoliths within these cores provided a snapshot of ancient fish populations, revealing the direct link between oxygen levels and fish abundance. During the most severe oxygen-depleted periods, known as the Sapropel S1 event, lanternfish nearly vanished, replaced by surface-dwelling species like anchovies.

The historical evidence is clear: when oxygen levels dropped, lanternfish populations were among the first to suffer. This pattern of collapse and recovery also reveals the potential for future ecological consequences. “Our findings corroborate expectations that future expansion of midwater deoxygenation could severely deplete mesopelagic fish communities,” noted the study authors. As oxygen minimum zones continue to grow, the fate of lanternfish may serve as a harbinger for other deep-sea species that rely on oxygen-rich waters.

The Ripple Effect: How Lanternfish Loss Will Impact Marine Food Chains

The decline of lanternfish would send ripples throughout marine food chains. Lanternfish are a key food source for numerous predators, including whales, tuna, squid, and seabirds. These species depend on the abundant biomass of lanternfish to fuel their growth and survival. If lanternfish populations collapse, the cascading effects could devastate commercial fisheries and disrupt marine ecosystems that humans rely on for food.

The research suggests that the disappearance of lanternfish would not only impact the creatures that feed on them but could also contribute to the collapse of entire food webs. For instance, tuna and other large fish that rely on lanternfish as a primary food source would face significant challenges, which could lead to reduced fish stocks and even the collapse of local fisheries. This highlights the interdependence of species in marine ecosystems and underscores the potential dangers of ocean deoxygenation on both marine life and human livelihoods.

Unlike typical AI research, where a model predicts outcomes or cleans up data, researchers at Emory University in Atlanta did something unusual. They trained a neural network to discover new physics.

The team achieved this unique feat by feeding their AI system experimental data from a mysterious state of matter called dusty plasma, a hot, electrically charged gas filled with tiny dust particles. The scientists then watched as the AI revealed surprisingly accurate descriptions of strange forces that were never fully understood before.

The development shows that AI can be used to uncover previously unknown laws that govern how particles interact in a chaotic system. Plus, it corrects long-held assumptions in plasma physics and opens the door to studying complex, many-particle systems ranging from living cells to industrial materials in entirely new ways.

“We showed that we can use AI to discover new physics. Our AI method is not a black box: we understand how and why it works. The framework it provides is also universal. It could potentially be applied to other many-body systems to open new routes to discovery,” Justin Burton, one of the study authors and a professor at Emory, said.

How did the AI learn to create laws?

The researchers combined real-world experiments with a carefully designed AI model. They began by studying dusty plasma. This state of matter is found across the universe, from Saturn’s rings and the moon’s surface to wildfire smoke on Earth.

However, despite its cosmic presence, the exact forces acting between the particles in dusty plasma have remained poorly understood. That’s because the system behaves in a non-reciprocal way, which means that the force one particle applies on another isn’t necessarily matched in return.

Understanding such interactions using traditional physics has proven incredibly difficult. So to tackle this problem, the scientists built a sophisticated 3D imaging system to observe how plastic dust particles moved inside a chamber filled with plasma. They used a laser sheet and high-speed camera to capture thousands of tiny particle movements in three dimensions over time.

These detailed trajectories were then used to train a custom neural network. Unlike most AI models that need huge datasets, the Emory team’s network was trained on a small but rich dataset and was engineered with built-in physical rules, like accounting for gravity, drag, and particle-to-particle forces.

“When you’re probing something new, you don’t have a lot of data to train AI. That meant we would have to design a neural network that could be trained with a small amount of data and still learn something new,” said Ilya Nemenman, senior study author and a professor at the university.

The neural network broke down the particle motion into three components: velocity effects (like drag), environmental forces (such as gravity), and inter-particle forces. This allowed the AI to learn complex behaviors while obeying basic physics principles.

As a result, it discovered precise descriptions of the non-reciprocal forces with over 99% accuracy. One surprising insight was that when one particle leads, it pulls the trailing one toward it, but the trailing one pushes the leader away. This kind of asymmetric interaction had been suspected but never clearly modeled before.

Neural network also rectified past assumptions

The AI corrected some faulty assumptions that shaped plasma theory for years. “What’s even more interesting is that we show that some common theoretical assumptions about these forces are not quite accurate. We’re able to correct these inaccuracies because we can now see what’s occurring in such exquisite detail,” Nemenman added.

For instance, one such assumption was that a particle’s electric charge increases exactly with its size—turns out, it doesn’t. Instead, the relationship depends on the surrounding plasma’s density and temperature.

Another mistaken idea was that the force between particles always decreases exponentially with distance, regardless of their size. The AI revealed that this drop-off also depends on how big the particles are, an insight previously overlooked.

The best part is, this AI model ran on something as modest as a desktop computer. It produced a universal framework that can now be applied to all sorts of many-particle systems, from paint mixtures to migrating cells in living organisms. This research also demonstrates that AI can go far beyond crunching numbers. It can actually help scientists discover the hidden rules that govern nature.

“For all the talk about how AI is revolutionizing science, there are very few examples where something fundamentally new has been found directly by an AI system,” Nemenman said. Hopefully, this work will encourage scientists to explore many other ways in which AI can benefit science and society.

The study is published in the journal PNAS.

NASA has unveiled a spectacular series of nine cosmic images captured by the Chandra X-ray Observatory, released on July 23, 2025. This new collection pushes the boundaries of space exploration and astronomy, offering the most detailed look at some of the universe’s most energetic phenomena. While Hubble and JWST have their own strengths—Hubble observing visible light and JWST peering into the infrared spectrum—Chandra’s specialized X-ray vision opens a window into the high-energy world of black holes, supernova remnants, and intense gas emissions.

The Power of Chandra’s X-ray Vision

The Chandra X-ray Observatory has been in operation since its launch in 1999, and its ability to detect X-rays has significantly enhanced our understanding of the high-energy universe. X-rays are emitted from the hottest, most energetic regions in space, such as black holes, neutron stars, and supernova remnants. This specialized capability allows scientists to study the most violent and energetic processes in the universe.

Each of these newly released images reveals a different part of the universe, shedding light on phenomena that are often invisible to traditional optical telescopes. The X-rays, represented in vivid pink and purple hues, allow astronomers to trace the path of energetic particles and gases. By combining Chandra’s observations with data from other telescopes like Hubble and JWST, scientists are able to compile a much more comprehensive picture of the cosmos, showing how objects in space interact and evolve.

Chandra’s focus on X-rays means it can explore regions such as superheated gas clouds or the intense energy generated by supernova explosions. The observatory’s findings are essential for understanding how galaxies and stars form, how black holes grow, and how matter behaves under extreme conditions. These insights open up vast new avenues for research and offer a deeper, more intricate look at the universe’s most energetic and enigmatic phenomena.

A Closer Look at the Cosmic Images

The newly released images offer a diverse set of cosmic phenomena, showcasing Chandra’s immense power and range. For example, the image of N79, a region of star formation in the Large Magellanic Cloud, reveals energetic gas shaped by the radiation and winds from young, hot stars. Chandra’s X-ray image of this region highlights how stars interact with their environment, showing how the gas is heated and influenced by their energy.

Another compelling image is NGC 2146, a spiral galaxy with a wealth of X-ray-emitting phenomena like supernova remnants and energetic winds from giant stars. Chandra’s X-ray vision captures the intense activity at the heart of this galaxy, revealing the interaction between the stars, gas, and dust. The X-rays emitted by the galaxy provide insights into how the energy generated by stars shapes the surrounding material.

In the case of IC 348, another star-forming region, Chandra’s X-ray images highlight how young stars are scattered among glowing interstellar dust. The reflective nature of the surrounding dust adds a layer of complexity to the image, as the light from the new stars interacts with it in fascinating ways. These images offer an up-close look at stellar birth and the complex processes that occur as new stars emerge.

The Role of Black Holes and Supernova Remnants

One of the most fascinating aspects of the images is how they highlight the role of black holes and supernova remnants. These are two of the most extreme objects in the universe, known for their immense gravitational pull and explosive power.

For instance, NGC 1068, a spiral galaxy featured in the collection, shows the incredible X-ray emissions from its active supermassive black hole. This black hole is surrounded by a high-energy environment that accelerates particles to nearly the speed of light, generating intense X-rays. These X-rays can be traced back to the winds coming from the black hole’s accretion disk, blowing at speeds of up to 1 million miles per hour. This discovery reinforces the idea that black holes are not only devouring matter but also actively shaping their surrounding environments with powerful energy outputs.

Similarly, the image of IC 1623, a galaxy merger, shows how supernova remnants are scattered throughout the collision zone. The intense energy produced by these remnants contributes to the formation of new stars, while simultaneously enriching the surrounding gas with elements forged in the explosion of previous stellar generations. These images provide a deeper understanding of how black holes and supernovae influence galaxy evolution and the formation of new stars.

FOR THE LAST 25 years, Canadian poet Christian Bök has taken on one of literature’s most audacious experiments: encoding a poem into the genome of an organism capable of outliving humanity itself. After years of Herculean endurance, collaborating with biologists to overcome almost impossible challenges, Bök has managed not only to succeed in this feat but also to write one of the most—if not the most—stringently constrained poems of all time. Now encoded within an extremophile bacterium named Deinococcus radiodurans, which can survive extremes of heat and cold, of desiccation, of irradiation, even of corrosive compounds, his poem, entitled The Xenotext, can replicate itself, thriving on our planet long after the human epoch has ended.

In the cadence of his responses, one can see that Bök believes in the power of poetry to chart the grand achievements of the human race. He sees The Xenotext extending from the same lineage as the Homeric sagas or Miltonic epics—works in which the fate of humanity finds itself tested and mythologized. While Bök has been known for the sweeping ambition of his projects (including his best-selling, univocalic collection Eunoia), The Xenotext may be his most outlandish yet. Not only has he tackled one of the most challenging poetic feats of the century; in doing so, he has also called into question the nature of language itself. While civilizations in the future may look back upon the germ that contains The Xenotext and see there one of the last vestiges of our culture, The Xenotext today forces us to consider the “poetics” of the genetic code and, by extension, the poetry that might be buried within the origins of life itself.

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DASHIEL CARRERA: How did you conceive of The Xenotext? Were you attracted most to the idea of crafting poetry from genetic material, or the idea of creating an eternal poem, or a bit of both?

CHRISTIAN BÖK: After my project Eunoia (a work that enjoyed global success in 2001), I thought that I had permission to do something more ambitious. I read two articles in science journals: one by Paul Davies (an astrobiologist who speculated about our search for extraterrestrial intelligence); and one by Pak Chung Wong (a bioscientist who enciphered information into the genome of an extremophilic microorganism). My readings of these two articles mutually reinforced each other.

In the case of Paul Davies, he implied that we might be searching for extraterrestrial intelligence in the wrong way—only because it was probably very difficult for aliens to maintain radio beacons over millions of years, and it was probably prohibitive to send crewed spaceships across interstellar distances. Davies suggested that civilizations would more likely send out robotic probes that could replicate themselves during their journeys, adapting to the environments that they encountered, auditing them until something got interesting enough to warrant communication. He speculated extravagantly that such machines already existed—in the form of spores and viruses. You could send out such biological emissaries with little messages encoded into their genomes, disseminating them from star to star through relatively inexpensive means, colonizing the galaxy in a few tens of millions of years. He seemed to suggest that, perhaps somewhere in our own ecosystems, there might, in fact, be genetic messages enciphered by aliens from outer space—but we just haven’t found them yet.

In the case of Pak Chung Wong, he showed that, in fact, we could already encipher messages in such a way, using germs to archive information. Why wait to look for such an alien civilization? Why not become such a civilization? Surely, you would want poetry, in fact, to be included in such an enterprise. I don’t think that I’d want my first genetic messages in life forms to be advertisements for Microsoft. I’d prefer that these messages were initially artistic. I thought that, given the work of Wong, such a project would prove to be a relatively straightforward process to undertake. As it turned out, of course, creating a work of “living poetry” proved to be an immensely challenging exercise at the very cutting edge of scientific endeavor.

What do you think it might mean for The Xenotext to reach an extraterrestrial civilization, after having outlived humanity?

Well, the project takes at least some of its inspiration from the Voyager probes—probably the most important objects ever created by humanity. The probes are among the only objects so far created with the capacity to outlast the sun, and they are going to testify to the existence of humanity for billions of years. If ever found, they are going to say something important about our presence in the cosmos, signaling to potential discoverers that, despite a lot of evidence to the contrary, they have shared this galaxy with some other form of intelligence.

Like the Voyager probes, my own poem The Xenotext might go undetected by any readership in the future—but if humanity disappears from the planet tomorrow, nothing that we’ve made on the surface of the earth is going to endure over epochal time; the earth is going to grind it all tectonically into dust, reducing everything to an almost undetectable layer in the geological strata. And if an intelligence were to show up on our planet, say, a few eons from now, the only evidence, perhaps, of our presence here would include three things. First, the background radiation from the enriched nuclear fuel, not natural to the geophysiology of the earth, but artificially enhanced by human activity. Second, evidence in the fossil record of a sixth mass extinction event, uncorrelated to any astrophysical disaster, like a solar flare or a comet impact, but presumably caused by a superpredator that occupied the planet. And third, evidence in the geological record of all the adverse effects of climate change currently being preserved in ice cores, but again not associated with any geological phenomenon. That’s it. That’s our legacy. Three forms of pollution. I’d probably prefer, again, that if we could testify to our legacy in deep time, we should leave behind something better—an archive or an artwork.

The Xenotext touches upon the role that poetry might play in the 21st century, acting as a harbinger for the risks that face us. You know, every civilization owes its existence, in part, to the invention of poetry. Without the inception of poetry, in song lines from at least 40,000 years ago, we wouldn’t have had our cultural heritage preserved and transmitted from generation to generation, through storytelling, through epics and sagas—through religious grimoires. We wouldn’t be here today without poetry that could, in effect, found a civilization—and yet, poetry no longer aspires to this kind of activity, forming the basis for preserving entire worlds.

Why are poets shying away from this form of activity?

I think that, at least for now, poets have found cause to express suspicion in the face of these epic sensibilities. The history of poetry shows a prolonged “devolution” from an epic stance towards time, shifting to a lyric stance towards the self. The scale at which poetry imagines itself has become much less grandiose, much less heroic in its aspirations, retreating instead into a more insular version of itself. I think that most poets today would look upon acts of heroism as vulgar, preferring to discredit Miltonic scales, if not Homeric scales, of achievement.

But I think that we’ve got good reason to express concern about such prejudices. For example, my first memory that I can actually date (my first awakening into consciousness) coincides with the moon landing of Apollo 11. My first memory consists of a little white ghost stepping off the rung of a ladder onto the grayness of an alien world. I remember watching this event on a small black-and-white television, installed on the lawn outside my house very late at night, my mother hugging me from behind, while pointing at the man on the screen, then pointing up at a waxing crescent moon in summer, just a few weeks shy of my third birthday. Not a lot of people can easily date their first memory—but mine is tantamount to watching a tetrapod flop out of the ocean onto land for the first time, 350 million years ago. The moon landing is probably the most important thing that life on earth has so far accomplished in its evolution—willfully escaping the gravity well to embark upon a journey to the stars. And yet, if I were to ask you “What’s your favorite, canonical poem about the moon landing?” you can’t name one, because there isn’t one. And in fact, the only poem that has any cultural cachet is actually a complaint about the event. To me, this fact is distressing. If the ancient Greeks had rowed a trireme to the moon, you can bet that they would’ve written 24 volumes of epic poetry about this adventure.

Recent administrative changes—in the US, at least—have reflected a withdrawal from scientific exploration. NASA has seen significant budget cuts, and there have been a number of grants cut or frozen at both the NIH and NSF. How do you see The Xenotext in conversation with this cultural shift?

Well, my work expresses optimism about the future, about the ability of poetry to outlast its own demise. At this time in the 20th century, during the 1920s, there were at least eight avant-garde aesthetic movements of global renown in the world, all making futuristic claims about innovations in poetry—but at this moment, in the early 21st century, during the 2020s, there’s at best only two. And again, I find this fact very disconcerting, because right now there’s more reason than ever to be innovative and experimental in the avant-garde. We’ve got more tools at our disposal, with even greater capacity to make a difference, contributing novel ideas to the tradition—and yet, for poetry, at least, we’ve entered into a period of relative, aesthetic conservatism, characterized by philistinic, if not puritanical, manias. I think that the job of the avant-garde, in most respects, is to ensure that everybody shows up for the future on time.

What made the literary constraints of your project uniquely difficult?

Well, the two poems of The Xenotext are written according to a mutually bijective cipher that responds to the biochemical constraints of the environment in the organism. Imagine this scenario: you’ve probably solved cryptograms in Sunday newspapers, where you’ve got an ostensibly nonsensical message, but if you analyze both its letter frequencies and its letter patterns, you could, through educated guesses, substitute the correct letters for the ones in the puzzle. Now I used to wonder, as a child, solving these puzzles, why the puzzle designers didn’t actually give us a meaningful sentence as the ciphertext, such that, if we analyzed its letter patterns and its letter frequencies, we could decipher it into yet another meaningful sentence. I now understand why the puzzle designers haven’t done this. The task is supremely difficult.

Imagine pairing off all the letters of the alphabet so that they’re mutually referential. If you assign A to T, you have to assign T to A. If you assign N to H, you have to assign H to N. If you assign Y to E, you have to assign E to Y. You do such pairings for every letter of the alphabet. With this one constraint, there exist a little less than 8 trillion possible ciphers at your disposal. Now select one of these possibilities through a set of heuristics. Then write a beautiful poem that makes sense in such a way that if you replace every letter with its cognate from your chosen cipher, you get another equally beautiful poem that also makes sense. So there’s eight trillion ciphers to explore—and despite the immense vastitude of this repertoire, none of them actually works. There’s almost no poetry anywhere among them. You can barely write a phrase that might actually translate from one text into the other meaningfully. And as it turns out, only one possibility (out of the eight trillion) can actually allow me to say anything at all. This one cipher produces a little dialogue between Orpheus and Eurydice—two poems that, for me, have a kind of unique fragility, because I didn’t write them so much as found them.

Imagine that in our own galaxy, there are probably trillions of exoplanets around billions of stars, and as far as we can tell, at first glance, none of these worlds seem to host any intelligent civilizations. And hey, if there’s no life out there, then there’s no poetry out there. So far as we know, poetry inhabits only one place in the cosmos. Among the eight trillion worlds in the galaxy, only our world has any poetry at all—and similarly here, among the eight trillion ciphers at my disposal, only one gives rise to poetry. So there’s a bit of spookiness in these two poems. A kind of uncanniness to them. They’re the only ones possible under the duress of this very difficult constraint—and it took me four years of labor to write this pair of sonnets. I worked on nothing else, and I really thought that the poems would prove to be the hardest part of the enterprise.

Alas, I faced even harder tasks. I still had to figure out how to ensure that the second poem would translate adequately into a viable protein capable of folding properly within the organism. I had to design a protein persistent enough to be detectable without being metabolized, ensuring that it remained benign enough not to affect the cell adversely. I discovered that I was confronting the hardest problem in bioengineering: figuring out how to predict the folding of a protein. There was a lot of voodoo that went into figuring out how to make this construct work, and the odds were stacked very heavily against me. The probability of finding this protein at random is around one in 100 novemquinquagintillion (a one followed by 180 zeros)—a number so large that there’s nothing in the universe to count with it. And again, finding the viable protein among the available repertoire is immensely difficult. For this reason, I think that my project testifies to the “extremophilic” characteristics of poetry itself—its capacity to arise under extraordinary conditions of duress, thriving perhaps under the worst conditions imaginable.

The Xenotext is, in part, a response to a quote by William Burroughs: “The word is now a virus.” How has working on this project affected your understanding of this quote?

The quote by Burroughs constitutes a very paranoid understanding of language, suggesting that language seems to have many of the characteristics that we associate with the infectiousness of a living system, capable of evolving on its own. Language seems to have sculpted out a niche for itself in our neurophysiology, hijacking our brains so as to turn them into reproductive organs.

The claims of Burroughs do not seem unwarranted. In our own culture, we can see information transmitted virally, with a kind of epidemiology attached to it, right? We can express concern about ideas poisoning our collective imagination, spreading too quickly, with people falling prey to information, because their minds do not host an adequate diversity of contending ideas, all of which might act as modulating immunities, helping us to interpret the truth.

To an avant-garde poet, such ideas might seem compelling. I like to think that, when working with language, I’m studying a kind of alien thing, reverse engineering it at Area 51, trying to produce antigravity machines from some technology that has crash-landed on earth from outer space. A language might look, at first glance, like a tool that we use to communicate with each other—but communication might not, in fact, represent the primary reason for its existence. It could have other attributes and functions, all of which remain extraneous to this rather practical function. I think that people often get upset with poets, in part, because we tend to break the social contract around language, exploring its functionality beyond our need to communicate.

Do you consider the engineered bacterium to be itself a sort of poem?

Well, I have written a poem that can literally reprogram the behavior of living things. The primary outcome of this project is the organism—a work of “living poetry,” embodied in a microbe. I’m making a claim about the “vitality” of poetry itself, that poetry has a kind of life of its own, that it might constitute a crucial feature, underpinning life itself—that there’s probably a “poetics,” so to speak, to the genetic code. The job of the poet is to make this poetics intelligible to the rest of us. And as you know, poetry is not simply limited to the marks upon the page or the vowels in my voice, but to other kinds of media as well. I think that poetry shows an immense capacity to replicate itself in all kinds of media—and again, by virtue of my status as an avant-garde poet, I’m trying to figure out how to make poetry as versatile as possible in a diverse variety of environments, contributing to its capacity to outlast us all.

At the end of Book 2 of The Xenotext, I’ve written a poem called “The Perfect Malware.” I regard this work as the best poem that I’ve so far written in the course of my career. I don’t think that I’ve written anything better—and its title constitutes my definition of life. If you were to ask me “What is life?”—I’d reply that it’s “the perfect malware.” It’s something that seems to infect matter, suddenly imbuing it with a kind of vitality, which permits matter to recopy itself, mutating and evolving, growing until it becomes something capable of thinking for itself. And I think that poetry, like life, constitutes a kind of malware, subversively animating the dead word.

Do you think genetic code itself has a poetry to it?

The genetic code consists of nothing more than three-letter words, “codons” that permute an alphabet of four “letters” (each letter corresponding to a molecule). With this alphabet, you can derive a lexicon of 64 three-letter words. A few of them are marks of punctuation—but in effect, you have rigorously constrained vocabulary. I’d dare any poet to imagine writing anything with so limited a lexicon, choosing 64 trigrams, then producing a body of literature as rich in its diversity as the complete repertoire of living things on the planet earth. All life that you see around you on this world, everything from jellyfishes to dragonflies, from labradoodles to nightingales, all these living things are made entirely with a lexicon of 64 short words. That’s it. With this set of constraints, the genetic code produces all the biological robustness that makes our planet beautiful. Nature establishes a standard of “poetics” to which poets can only aspire. I can certainly think of no other procedural constraint more extreme than the code that governs the artistry of life itself. The semiotic framework of biochemistry underlies an improbable aesthetics that, when you look at the history of the earth, seems intent on making things more beautiful. If life has a purpose, it seems to transform otherwise infernal, hellish environments into something more hospitable, something that is, by comparison, more akin to paradise.

And I suppose that my poem, with its infernal allusion to the story of Orpheus and Eurydice, speaks to the capacity of life (of love) to make hell itself more heavenly for the rest of us.

¤

Christian Bök is the author of Eunoia (Coach House Books, 2001), a best-selling work of experimental literature, which has gone on to win the Griffin Prize for Excellence in Poetry (2002). Crystallography (Coach House, 1994), his first book of poetry, was nominated for the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award (1995). Nature has interviewed Bök about his work on The Xenotext (making him the first poet ever to appear in this famous journal of science). Bök has also exhibited artworks derived from The Xenotext at galleries around the world; moreover, his poem from this project has hitched a ride, as a digital payload, aboard a number of probes exploring our solar system (including the InSight lander, now at Elysium Planitia on the surface of Mars). Bök is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, and he teaches at Leeds School of Arts in the UK.

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How does the inside of the Earth stay boiling hot for billions of years? Henry, age 11, Somerville, Massachusetts

Our Earth is structured sort of like an onion – it’s one layer after another.

Starting from the top down, there’s the crust, which includes the surface you walk on; then farther down, the mantle, mostly solid rock; then even deeper, the outer core, made of liquid iron; and finally, the inner core, made of solid iron, and with a radius that’s 70% the size of the Moon’s. The deeper you dive, the hotter it gets – parts of the core are as hot as the surface of the Sun.

Journey to the center of the Earth

As a professor of earth and planetary sciences, I study the insides of our world. Just as a doctor can use a technique called sonography to make pictures of the structures inside your body with ultrasound waves, scientists use a similar technique to image the Earth’s internal structures. But instead of ultrasound, geoscientists use seismic waves – sound waves produced by earthquakes.

At the Earth’s surface, you see dirt, sand, grass and pavement, of course. Seismic vibrations reveal what’s below that: rocks, large and small. This is all part of the crust, which may go down as far as 20 miles (30 kilometers); it floats on top of the layer called the mantle.

The upper part of the mantle typically moves together with the crust. Together, they are called the lithosphere, which is about 60 miles (100 kilometers) thick on average, although it can be thicker at some locations.

The lithosphere is divided into several large blocks called plates. For example, the Pacific plate is beneath the whole Pacific Ocean, and the North American plate covers most of North America. Plates are kind of like puzzle pieces that fit roughly together and cover the surface of the Earth.

The plates are not static; instead, they move. Sometimes it’s the tiniest fraction of inches over a period of years. Other times, there’s more movement, and it’s more sudden. This sort of movement is what triggers earthquakes and volcanic eruptions.

What’s more, plate movement is a critical, and probably essential, factor driving the evolution of life on Earth, because the moving plates change the environment and force life to adapt to new conditions.

The heat is on

Plate motion requires a hot mantle. And indeed, as you go deeper into the Earth, the temperature increases.

At the bottom of the plates, around 60 miles (100 kilometers) deep, the temperature is about 2,400 degrees Fahrenheit (1,300 degrees Celsius).

By the time you get to the boundary between the mantle and the outer core, which is 1,800 miles (2,900 kilometers) down, the temperature is nearly 5,000 F (2,700 C).

Then, at the boundary between outer and inner cores, the temperature doubles, to nearly 10,800 F (over 6,000 C). That’s the part that’s as hot as the surface of the Sun. At that temperature, virtually everything – metals, diamonds, human beings – vaporizes into gas. But because the core is at such high pressure deep within the planet, the iron it’s made up of remains liquid or solid.

Collisions in outer space

Where does all that heat come from?

It is not from the Sun. While it warms us and all the plants and animals on Earth’s surface, sunlight can’t penetrate through miles of the planet’s interior.

Instead, there are two sources. One is the heat that Earth inherited during its formation 4.5 billion years ago. The Earth was made from the solar nebula, a gigantic gaseous cloud, amid endless collisions and mergings between bits of rock and debris called planetesimals. This process took tens of millions of years.

An enormous amount of heat was produced during those collisions, enough to melt the whole Earth. Although some of that heat was lost in space, the rest of it was locked away inside the Earth, where much of it remains even today.

The other heat source: the decay of radioactive isotopes, distributed everywhere in the Earth.

To understand this, first imagine an element as a family with isotopes as its members. Every atom of a given element has the same number of protons, but different isotope cousins have varying numbers of neutrons.

Radioactive isotopes are not stable. They release a steady stream of energy that converts to heat. Potassium-40, thorium-232, uranium-235 and uranium-238 are four of the radioactive isotopes keeping Earth’s interior hot.

Some of those names may sound familiar to you. Uranium-235, for example, is used as a fuel in nuclear power plants. Earth is in no danger of running out of these sources of heat: Although most of the original uranium-235 and potassium-40 are gone, there’s enough thorium-232 and uranium-238 to last for billions more years.

Along with the hot core and mantle, these energy-releasing isotopes provide the heat to drive the motion of the plates.

No heat, no plate movement, no life

Even now, the moving plates keep changing the surface of the Earth, constantly making new lands and new oceans over millions and billions of years. The plates also affect the atmosphere over similarly lengthy time scales.

But without the Earth’s internal heat, the plates would not have been moving. The Earth would have cooled down. Our world would likely have been uninhabitable. You wouldn’t be here.

Think about that, the next time you feel the Earth under your feet.

Hello, curious kids! Do you have a question you’d like an expert to answer? Ask an adult to send your question to CuriousKidsUS@theconversation.com. Please tell us your name, age and the city where you live.

This article is republished from The Conversation, a nonprofit, independent news organization bringing you facts and trustworthy analysis to help you make sense of our complex world. It was written by: Shichun Huang, University of Tennessee

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Shichun Huang does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

Scientists were caught by surprise after discovering a massive flood of subglacial lakewater burst through Greenland’s ice sheet, spilling copious amounts of water across its surface.

As detailed in a new paper published in the journal Nature Geoscience, it’s the first time such a phenomenon has been observed, highlighting the fierce power being stored in meltwater lurking beneath a thick sheet of ice.

The event also defies our predictions of how the Greenland ice sheet evolves over time, even when taking climate change and the accelerating melting of ice sheets into consideration.

“The existence of subglacial lakes beneath the Greenland Ice Sheet is still a relatively recent discovery, and — as our study shows — there is still much we don’t know about how they evolve and how they can impact on the ice sheet system,” said lead author and Lancaster University PhD Jade Bowling in a statement.

The team analyzed data from several European Space Agency and NASA satellite missions to construct three-dimensional models of the area.

Over just ten days in 2014, they watched as a 278-feet-deep crater opened up across a 0.7-square-mile area, causing 23 billion gallons of water to flood out.

According to the statement, that’s the equivalent of nine hours of water gushing over the Niagara Falls at its peak flow.

The gushing water caused a massive area, roughly twice the size of Central Park, of fractured and distorted ice to appear.

“When we first saw this, because it was so unexpected, we thought there was an issue with our data,” explained Bowling. “However, as we went deeper into our analysis, it became clear that what we were observing was the aftermath of a huge flood of water escaping from underneath the ice.”

The team is hoping to use the data to get a better sense of the effects this phenomenon has on the immediate area.

“Importantly, our work demonstrates the need to better understand how often they drain, and, critically, what the consequences are for the surrounding ice sheet,” Bowling said.

As global warming continues to threaten the Earth’s polar ice sheets, scientists are hopeful that these kinds of measurements can give us a better sense of how human activity is actively reshaping the planet.

“Satellites represent an essential tool for monitoring the impacts of climate change, and provide critical information to build realistic models of how our planet may change in the future,” said coauthor and Lancaster University environmental data scientist Mal McMillan in the statement. “This is something that all of us depend upon for building societal resilience and mitigating the impacts of climate change.”

More on ice sheets: Horrifying Research Finds Melting Glaciers Could Activate Deadly Volcanoes