It was early September — that's springtime in Western Australia — and two young biologists, Dwayne Gwynne and David Rentz, were on a field trip, wandering dirt roads near the highways, looking for insects, when one of them noticed a loose beer bottle lying on the ground — not so unusual in the Dongara region, where Australians zooming by often launch beer bottles from their car windows. This particular bottle was a "stubbie," squat, 370 milliliters, colored golden brown.

When the two looked more closely, they saw something extra, hanging on the bottom end. It was a beetle, and it was fiercely gripping the glass. They shook it, and it wouldn't fall off. It wanted to be there.

Looking even closer, they recognized it as an Australian jewel beetle, and looking closer, they noticed it had (as they wrote later) its "genitalia everted — attempting to insert the aedeagus," which is a very polite way to say they were looking at a beetle attempting to mate with a glass container. Clearly, this was a very confused individual.

But then they found three more stubby beer bottles, and on two of them, surprisingly, were more male beetles, also "mounting" their bottles. That makes three frustrated males.

Hmmm. That got them interested. So they wandered about, found four loose stubbies, and placed them side by side on open ground where they could be seen by any male beetles flying overhead. "Within 30 minutes," they wrote later, "two of the bottles had attracted beetles. In total, 6 male beetles were observed to mount the stubbies. Once on the bottles, the beetles did not leave unless displaced by us."

More surprising, Gwynne and Rentz found one beetle hanging onto his bottle even while "a number of ants" were busy biting "the soft portions of his everted genitalia" — and still he stuck to his business. This was not just a pattern, this was a mission. What, the two scientists wondered, could explain these beetles' superallegiance to Australian beer bottles? It wasn't the beer. These males didn't gather at the spout end, and the bottles, the scientists said, were long dry.

The answer became obvious when they got a close look at a female Australian jewel beetle. Females, as it happens, are golden brown. They are big — much bigger than the males. But most important, they are covered, as you see here, with dimples, little bumps.

Australian beer bottles at the time (this happened in the 1980s) were also big, also golden brown, and down near the base they also had little bumps, arrayed very much like the bumps on a female jewel beetle.

Clearly, Gwynne and Rentz wrote in their paper, the males were unable to distinguish between beer bottles and lady beetles. They thought — or rather their inner wiring told them — they were mating.

This is what biologists call "an evolutionary trap." It's what happens when birds, turtles, moths, beetles, all kinds of animals, wired to respond to certain cues in nature, bump instead into human inventions and get confused. They try to do the right thing — like having a little baby beetle, and end up spending hours scraping glass.

When sea turtles finish laying eggs on beaches, they look for moonlight over the ocean. The light tells them which direction leads back to the sea. Hotels with big lights on their end of the beach can confuse mother turtles, making them go the wrong way. Some hotels now douse their lights when sea turtles come to lay their eggs.

There are so many examples. Farmers in the Midwest used to put red insulators on their electric fences. Hummingbirds thought they were red flowers. If they touched the wire with their beaks, they died. The insulator company, when it realized what was happening, stopped using red paint, and farmers eventually substituted not-red models. As the world gets more crowded, some humans are learning to try — at least some of the time — to be less of a nuisance to other animals.

That, happily, is how our jewel beetle story ends. When beer companies in Australia learned that their bottles were having a discernible effect on the population of jewel beetles — so many males were spending useless hours fornicating, often dying under the hot Australian sun and leaving no heirs — the companies decided to change their bottles. The little bumps were eliminated to be replaced by smooth glass, the beetles lost all interest in bottles, and life in the Australian west — at least beetle life — went back to normal.

The problem is, this problem doesn't end. Humans keep inventing things. Animals keep bumping into these things, sometimes with very unhappy results, and we have to keep correcting our mistakes. That's one reason we've been given the big brains, I suppose, to help us undo the many things we've done when didn't even know we were doing them.

Thanks to Carl Zimmer, Radiolab regular and author of the wonderful blog, The Loom, whose musings about evolutionary traps and the work of Bruce Robertson of Bard College, Jennifer Rehage of Florida International University and Andrew Sih of the University of California, Davis, got me thinking about all this. Also, thanks to two wonderful songwriters out of Britain, Flanders and Swann, who years ago wrote about the impossible love of an armadillo for an Army tank — one of the most poignant evolutionary traps ever. Their song includes these lines ...

Then I saw them in a hollow, by a yellow muddy bank
An Armadillo singing ... to an armour-plated tank.
Should I tell him, gaunt and rusting, with the willow tree above,
This - abandoned on manoeuvres - is the object of your love?

I left him to his singing,
Cycled home without a pause,
Never tell a man the truth
About the one that he adores.

And to further celebrate my theme, for those of you who want to see beetle/bottle footage from Australia, here's a BBC video which would be X-rated if you were an underage beetle unaccompanied by an adult.

Usually they're naked, ancient and stony. But all of a sudden, they could live next door.

The Paris-based designer Leo Caillard had, as he wrote me, "the idea conception" and took the photographs. Alexis Persani dressed them. (Not actually; it was done on a computer, as you can see here. I know that putting modern clothes on classical sculptures isn't a new idea. Michelangelo's David has had "Fridge Fun" modern clothes for years. But the skirts, T-shirts and shorts in these images look so comfortable and fit so well, these ancients torque suddenly into moderns. It's like these two French artists have developed a new way to time travel. Which has me wondering about the reverse possibility: Beyonce, Halle Berry, Leo DiCaprio given drapes, spears and marbleized — could they pass for "ancient" at the Louvre in France?

The 19th century just lost its last living man.

Jiroemon Kimura, of Kyotango, Japan, was born in April 1897, lived right through the 20th century and died last Wednesday. He was 116. According to Guinness World Records (which searches for these things), he was the last surviving male born in the 1800s. All the other boys from that century, as best we know, are dead.

The ladies, however, are still ticking. Misao Okawa of Osaka is now officially the oldest person on the planet. She was born in 1898. There are four others — two in Britain, one in the USA, and another in Japan — all 19th century-born, all female, all still alive.

Once again, the ladies have outlasted the gentlemen. Not that that's a big surprise.

Women, on average, seem to take a little longer to die. But here's what I didn't know: Women, it turns out, don't just win in the end. It seems that women consistently outlive men in every age cohort. Fetal boys die more often than fetal girls. Baby boys die more often than baby girls. Little boys die more often than little girls. Teenage boys, 20-something boys, 30-something boys — in every age group, the rate of death for guys is higher than for women. The difference widens when we hit our 50s and 60s. Men gallop ahead, then the dying differential narrows, but death keeps favoring males right to the end.

After that, everybody's dead.

So Death, it turns out, is not an equal opportunity avenger. It seems to consistently favor males. Why? What is it about maleness that brings Death knocking?

The Fetal Difference

First off, whatever we males are doing wrong, nature seems to know about it. Because when human babies are conceived, says a 2002 study, "the ratio of males to females ... has been estimated to be from 107 to 170 males per 100 females." The storks, it seems, drop extra boy babies into wombs, almost as if they know what's coming. But even with a boost at conception, male fetuses don't make it out of the uterus as often as female fetuses. The death differential, says the study, "has been estimated to be from 111 to 160 males per hundred females." So miscarriages are mostly male.

The Baby Difference

Then come birthdays. More boy babies get born than girl babies. This is true all over the world. In America, it's 105 males for every 100 females. But as soon as they're out, the boys start to go. Male babies born prematurely die more often than females. Birth weight is not as strong a predictor as gender. You can be born impossibly small, and if you're a girl you are still slightly more likely to make it through.

The Adolescent Difference

The male disadvantage spikes during the teens and early 20s. This is the time when young men fight, go to war, dare and don't wear motorcycle helmets. Their deaths here are increasingly accidental, suicidal, homicidal or war related. "If deaths from violence are excluded," says a study from the Society of Actuaries, the spike in the early 20s disappears completely, though the female advantage remains. Not too long ago, young women got pregnant and many died having babies during their 20s, but in the modern era, childbirth mortality is down; male derring-do less so.

The Middle Years Difference

Here the gender difference narrows and holds steady, but if you look across the years, men are more likely to die from injuries, and (at least in the USA) from suicide, respiratory cancer, cirrhosis of the liver, emphysema and coronary heart disease. Leading female diseases — breast cancer and cervical cancer — do damage, but not as much as the male diseases.

The Oldies Difference

Somewhere in our 50s, the men begin to accelerate their dying, and that difference peaks in our 60s and early 70s, and then narrows. In the last lap, among the oldest of the oldies — people 110 and over — women are lopsidedly the survivors. In America, 9 out of 10 of the "supercentenarians" are female. Jiroemon Kimura, the farmer/mailman who died last week in Japan — was a double exception; he was not only super-old, he was a super-old male. That's very rare.

But Why The Difference?

Which brings us back to the deeper question (again, we're talking not about you in particular; we are making a statistical argument based on averages): Is there something about being male that, all by itself, shortens a lifespan? And if so, is it correctible or built in? The most famous paper on this subject "Why Men Die Younger," comes from an actuary (naturally) working in Seattle, Barbara Blatt Kalben. In 2002, she wrote that being a guy is definitely more dangerous, but she has a bevy of reasons why that might be, and she doesn't choose a winner.

Blame Testosterone?

There are obvious behavioral differences between men and women, she writes. Some of them might be cultural. Men are more violent, which puts them in harm's way more often. They consistently consume more tobacco, alcohol and drugs, which makes them sicker (then deader) later on. The explanations for this difference could be chromosomal or hormonal (more testosterone) and therefore hard to change; or they could be learned.

Blame Size?

Other explanations seem hard-wired and not fixable. Men, she notes, are generally bigger, which reflects a general rule in biology, seen in most species, which says (quoting from a study) "that larger (size) individuals (within a species) tend on average to have shorter lives." This has proved true for animals in the wild, showing up in worms, fish, insects, mammals and, of course, our group, the primates. The bigger among us (again, on average) die earlier. (I've noticed this among dogs, but birds, she says, are a notable exception — Big Bird, if he existed, would likely last longer than your average garden robin.)

But now comes the explanation that made me wince.

Blame Male Weakness

Barbara Kalben mentions it, quoting E.V. Allen of the Mayo Clinic, who in 1934 wrote an essay that said "mere maleness" is a predictor of greater mortality. Something about being male "influences unfavorably the resistance ... to disease at all ages." He called it "male weakness."

"The factors which are usually set down in explanation of the greater mortality in males are overwork, alcoholism, venery [I looked it up, it means lots of sex and also hunting] tobaccoism, exposure to the elements, industrial hazards, and irregular habits of eating and sleeping. ...

"For each explanation of the lack of inherent vitality of the male there are objections, but these do not influence the fact; the male is, by comparison with the female, a weakling at all periods of life from conception to death. Venery, alcoholism, exposure, overwork, and various other factors may influence the susceptibility to disease and the greater mortality of the adult male, but they are only straws placed on the greater burden of his sex-linked weakness.

"There seems to be no doubt that, speaking comparatively, the price of maleness is weakness."

So, for many reasons, because of our hormones, our chromosomes, our lifestyle, the stresses of being a guy, we become (or are born) more fragile. This is not exactly my image of maleness, which runs more to Achilles or to Muhammad Ali, but the data suggests that in the long run, when it comes to just surviving, it's the ladies who pack steel.

A bunch of years ago on ABC News, in a series I did with Ted Koppel called Brave New World, I touched on the theme of time with two friends of mine, John Lennell and John Flansburgh, better known as They Might Be Giants. They made a music video to illustrate our hourlong essay, which included this refrain: "You're older than you were before, and now you're even older ..." lines that make me smile to this day. Both the Johns and the three musicians they hired (all named Dan) and I (I introduce the song) are older than we were before ... and, as sometimes happens, now we're even older. Notice, there are no women in the video. If we'd included any, chances are they'd have gone on and on and on and, in a gender-embarrassing way, outlasted us.

What is it about dolphins? They have very, very big brains, and that makes we humans, whose brains are nothing to sniff at, nervous. We don't know what to make of them.

The latest example: On May 17 in India, the Ministry of Environment and Forests issued an order to all Indian states banning dolphin amusement parks. No leaping out of pools to catch balls, no jumping through hoops. Forcing dolphins to entertain humans, the ministry said, was morally unacceptable.

"Cetaceans [dolphins, whales and porpoises] in general are highly intelligent and sensitive," the Ministry said, "and various scientists who have researched dolphin behavior have suggested that [they have] unusually high intelligence ... compared to other animals."

This means, the Indian ministry went on: "that dolphins should be seen as 'non-human persons' and as such should have their own specific rights." "Non-human persons" — what a pregnant phrase! People-like, but not like people.

India's putting dolphins (and the other cetaceans) into a new legal category that classifies them as beings nearer to ourselves, with an emotional life that, if we could talk to them, or listen in to whatever they're saying, we might find familiar. I'm thinking of the famous New Yorker cartoon that shows two dolphins swimming side-by-side, where one of them says to another, "If I could do only one thing before I died, it would be to swim with a middle aged couple from Connecticut." (Which you can see here.)

You may giggle, but the joke hurts. Big-brained animals almost certainly wouldn't want to spend years lugging polyester-skinned mammals across shallow swimming pools six days a week, or juggling colorful balls with their rostrums (noses). Their brains suggest they've got better things to do. What, we're not sure. All we know is, being a dolphin has to be a very different from being a person, an experience we can only guess at.

And yet, because of those brains, it's hard not to slip into thinking of them as if they were variants of us. This happened to me, instantly, last year, when I read that the U.S. Navy had decided to "retire" a group of mine-detecting dolphins, replacing them with robots.

Twenty-four dolphins, after years of service, were being "reassigned," the story said, so that sea drones, or unmanned underwater vehicles (UUVs, in Navy parlance) could take their place. The Navy had its reasons. The robots didn't need constant feeding, medical attention, cages and rest. They didn't need seven years of training. Robots could do the job on day one for less — much less. So the dolphins got sacked.

And I thought, what? And, instantly, each of those dolphins became a Norma Rae, fists (fins?) clenched, crying "UNFAIR!" After giving their whole careers to the Navy, sniffing for underwater mines to protect our ships and harbors, this is the thanks they get? That, of course, was my mind shouting; what the dolphins were thinking, if they even noticed the change, is anybody's guess.

Which is the puzzle. The deep puzzle.

I can understand why an animal that looks like us, a gorilla or an orangutan, with their familiar faces and gestures would get our attention and respect. But dolphins don't blink like we do, don't gaze thoughtfully or frown (ever). Their faces are like masks, and yet, because an organ hidden in their heads, because their brain resembles ours in size, we ignore their different shape, their different habitat, their alien-ness, and we embrace them as "non-human persons."

To be fair, their brains are big. Lori Marino, a dolphin expert at Emory University, told Discovery News that dolphin brains are about "five times larger for their body size when compared to another animal of similar size," meaning their brains are almost as disproportionately large as ours. We are seven times the norm. "Not a huge difference," she says.

The part of the brain dedicated to abstract thinking, the neocortex, in a dolphin brain is "more highly convoluted than our own," she said, and it is her opinion that dolphins are capable of complex, subtle thinking. You don't have a brain like that for no reason.

We Haven't Cracked The Code

So what's the reason? Dolphin scientists assume these animals are very social and communicate constantly, and the brains they have are designed to manage all that inter-dolphin messaging. As to what they're talking about — we haven't cracked the code. But because we, the other big brained species, have used our brains to organize armies, to re-design landscapes, to invade the sky, to dominate all the continents and to wipe out almost all the other large animals, we may have the faint suspicion that if they choose, dolphins could do likewise. It's a possibility that we can't completely dismiss. We just don't know.

Well — that's not right. One of us knows. The late and very lamented British writer, satirist, and wildlife explorer Doug Adams, in Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, explained that "on the planet Earth, man had always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much — the wheel, New York, wars and so on — whilst all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time. But conversely, the dolphins had always believed that they were far more intelligent than man — for precisely the same reasons."

Maybe that's why they fascinate us. What if, after tens of thousands of years conquering and murdering and dominating, it turns out that leaping, diving and mucking around in the water is what the real smarties do?

I've been to New Delhi where traffic is frightening. I've seen pictures of Nairobi and Bangkok, where it's even scarier. But Ho Chi Minh City? The town we used to call Saigon? I don't think I'd put myself in a truck, car, bike or even a Sherman tank in that town. This video opens in the scariest traffic circle I could imagine — actually, it's beyond imagining — where bikes, cars and people seem simultaneously, collectively and individually heading straight at each other (when you look, just count the vehicles and people on collision course; there are at least two or three in every frame). It's a metropolitan circle of death, and yet ...

What Cezanne did for apples, Rob Whitworth does for city traffic. His short videos of big Asian cities — Shanghai and most recently Kuala Lumpur — make what for me (a Manhattan boy) are the boringest, ugliest, most useless parts of cities — the traffic clogged streets — oddly beautiful. He must have grown up in L.A., I decided. But when I looked, it turns out ... no, he's British. Go figure.

There's a new lunch place down the block, so like you do when the menu looks interesting, I walked in and ordered something mysterious, which for me was the "Red Lentil and Edamame Salad," mostly because I can never remember what edamame is, and because that word suggests doing something slightly frightening, like munching accidentally on one's mother.

How Much Energy Am I Eating? Enough To Power A Flashlight?

What arrived was a bowl of lentils, roasted carrots, raisins, mint and (I'm guessing) edamame beans. I took the bowl to a window seat, and that's when my mind began to wander. My mind doesn't need much to go free. It slips off whenever I let it, when I'm by myself and alone with my thoughts, which, at this moment, were: "So I'm chewing these beans and I'm breaking them into little bits, which will become littler bits in my stomach, (bond-breaking, as the chemists would say) so I'm turning food into energy. But how much energy am I getting? Does a salad produce enough calories or watts or whatever, to light a flashlight? Or run an electric toothbrush for 10 minutes?

(Do you ever do this? I do this all the time.)

After lunch I looked up the answer. I found it in a fine little book by Wayne State Professor Peter Hoffman, called Life's Ratchet: How Molecular Machines Extract Order from Chaos. In it, he says humans will typically eat roughly 2,500 calories a day.

1.5 Million Joules Is ... ?

Professor Hoffman is a physicist. He goes on to make some quick calculations. If one food calorie equals 4,184 joules of energy, at 2,500 calories a day, that means our bodies break down or release 1.5 million joules. Sounds like a lot, no? But if you divide those joules by the number of seconds in a day (86,400), that works out to a rate (where 1 watt = 1 joule per second) of about — 120 watts a day. In other words, that's all I need to dream, wake, dress, shower, work, walk to a restaurant, order a salad, ask myself how much energy am I using, and then look it up, think about it, and write this essay. I can power all trillion cells (of me) for a day at the same rate that it takes to light one 120-watt light bulb.

That's it?

That's it. Peter Hoffman writes, "Humans talk, write, walk and love using the same amount of energy per second as a light bulb."

I'm humbled. I will now confess that when I got back from the salad place, I diddled, I called friends, yakked with office mates and used up lots of time to avoid writing this, and yet — down deep, at a cellular level, it turns out I'm a mind-boggling display of energy efficiency. You too, of course.

On certain afternoons, this is a nice thing to know.

I was standing in New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art the other day, where there's a full-sized Egyptian temple, called Dendur. It's housed under a glass roof ...

And standing there, gazing at profiles of Egyptian nobles etched onto the limestone, I noticed a bunch of what we now call "tags" — basically graffiti, carved by tourists, who back in the early 1800s made a habit of carving their names onto the places they visited. Basically, it's a "Hey, I was here!" thing. Here's the first one I saw, inside Dendur, carved by somebody named "L. Politi" in 1819. And alongside it, in smaller letters just down to the left, is "Drovetti, 1816."

Of course, when you see your first ones, you start looking for more, and because Napoleon brought an army to Egypt, thousands of young guys with bayonets and spare time visited ancient sites. That's why Egyptian artifacts are covered with graffiti. Check just below this guy's beard at Abu Simbel:

But here at the Met, looking for names, I suddenly saw something that made me stop short. "Oh," I thought. "This is very bad luck."

There, sitting right next to a carved Egyptian figure, an obviously important official — straight in his line of sight — was a graffito from someone named "L. Brad—" (couldn't read the rest of it) who added "of NY US." The date was 1821. The "2" doesn't look like a "2," but it is.

Think about this. A guy (I figure it was a guy) from New York, heads off to Egypt, makes his way up the Nile to an obscure little temple called Dendur. When nobody's looking (I figure, even in 1821, they didn't allow tourists to carve autographs), he does his dirty little deed and then disappears, going back, we hope, to America. His small indiscretion is a secret. It's one of those "What happens in Las Vegas stays in Las Vegas" things — except for this unfortunate coda.

The tag that he illegally carved ...

And the wall it was carved on ...

And the walls it was attached to, and the roof and the columns ...

In fact, the whole temple, was lifted up, shipped, unpacked and placed smack in the middle of New York City in 1978, in one of the most visited institutions in the world, where tens of thousands, no, hundreds of thousands of people peer at it and discover a homeboy, "L. Brad—" advertising himself.

"L" in his wildest moments couldn't have imagined this. Nobody could. It's embarrassing, in a charming way.

So I wondered, who is this "L. Brad—"? Do we know anything about him? Well, it turns out (thank you, Egle Zygas, press officer at the Met) we do. What I learned made my smile even wider because "L. Brad—" later in life became a Somebody — who wouldn't want it known that he'd tagged a temple.

According to a scholar named Cyril Aldred, "L. Brad—" was Luther Bradish, who served in the U.S. Army, fought in the War of 1812, became a lawyer and then became an agent — I think the modern word for it would be spy, sent by President Monroe to Constantinople, to figure out who to talk to about all the pirates chasing American ships in the Mediterranean.

Bradish, it turns out, wasn't very good at intelligence gathering, but somewhere during his stay, he slipped down to Egypt and visited Dendur and carved his name into the limestone. Why a secret agent would do that, I don't know.

But the important thing is, when he returned to New York, Luther Bradish became very, very respectable. He was elected to the New York State Assembly, became its speaker, then became lieutenant governor of New York, ran for governor, lost and spent the later part of his life as — consider the irony here — president of the New-York Historical Society — an organization dedicated to the preservation and protection of old things.

Luther Bradish was buried in Brooklyn, in Greenwood Cemetery. The marker, of course, makes no reference to his travels to Egypt, but I have, at no one's invitation, thought up a a few appropriate lines:

Naughty, Naughty Luther B

Wrote his name illegally.

Wrote It on a Temple Wall,

Then fled the scene that bears his scrawl

But rather than say, Bye, Shalom,

The Wall then followed Luther home

—————————————————————————————————————————-

No doubt some of you know Temple Tagging is still practiced by modern tourists, most recently by a 15-year-old middle school student from Nanjing, China. Ding Jinhao was in Egypt with his parents, and when nobody was looking he scratched "Ding Jinhao was here" onto a 3,500-year-old temple carving at the Temple of Luxor. Another Chinese tourist, Shen Yuwen, noticed and took this picture.

Last week this photo very quickly went viral. Ding Jinhao was identified online. Thousands of people called him a national disgrace; some sent death threats. Ding's mother told a local paper, "We want to apologize to the Egyptian people and to the people who have paid attention to this case across China." She then added that her son "cried all night." He was so ashamed.

It starts on a highway.

The camera pushes in. And there, near the meridian line, you see a faint scattering of red lights. Something is in the tar. And it's glowing.

One by one, teeny red cubes, with delicate circuitry on their sides, squeeze themselves out of the suddenly soft road and start to bounce free ...

There are thousands of them. Tens of thousands. They are rippling with energy, and they're waiting ... waiting ...

... for what seems like a command, when, all of a sudden, they start climbing frantically on top of one another, scrambling upward to form — clearly, they're becoming something ... but what?

It's a ... a ...

... a faceless avatar of evil (of course) from the movie Ra.One, a Bollywood sci-fi film starring Shah Rukh Khan.

In the movie, the cubes are little units of intelligence, magnetized and given a wee bit of energy to create the villain's body, mask and clothing. Here's the creepy scene ...

This is, of course, movie technology, something dreamed up by a screenwriter who imagined it while sitting at a cafe somewhere, far from facts, engineers and common sense — in other words, a movie fantasy.

Except it isn't! To my astonishment, there's a lab at MIT working on smart cubes, and to my double-astonishment, they look very much like the cubes in the movie, and triple-astonishing, what MIT's Daniela Rus and Kyle Gilpin plan to do with their cubes is queerer and more fantastic than the movie version. Plus, they've already started.

Here are the ingredients:

As you can see, they've got a little cube frame, some simple, foldable circuitry and a battery pack. Each cube can link, unlink and send a message to a neighbor. Right now, these cubes are about the size they were in Ra.One, the movie, but engineer Kyle Gilpin wants to make them smaller, way smaller. He wants to make what he calls "smart sand."

Here's what he imagines. You fill a bag with these little intelligent grains, and then you drop in ... oh, it could be anything — a hammer, a doll house version of a chair — and then you shake. That's all you do ... shake.

What happens is the sand gets bumped around, and eventually the little grains get wedged up against the hammer inside. The hammer is now covered, on all sides, by sand. Here's the beauty part: Each grain of sand that's touching the hammer maps its little border, and when all the grains communicate, together they create a perfect silhouette of a hammer.

And then (I should say "AND THEN!" because this is so surprising) ... Kyle Gilpin thinks he can get his bits of sand to send messages to the rest of the sand in the bag — loose sand, not near the hammer. The message is: "Copy this!" And the new grains will create a perfect copy of the hammer!

Hammer Cloning

So now we've got two hammers in blocks of sand sitting in the bag, the original and the copy, and then (no, let me say AND THEN! ... ), a command is given to "Let go!" And all of the grains that aren't being hammers fall away, leaving two distinct hammers inside in a pile of loose sand. You can then open the bag, reach in and pull out the original hammer and a perfect, sand-built copy.

Or if you like, you can put in a little hammer, and have the smart sand give you a bigger one. When you are done with the hammer, you can drop it back in the bag and give it the "Disassociate" command, and it will go back to sand.

Crazy, no? Each grain of sand has no idea what it's about to build. Nobody says to the grains, "Here's a blueprint." Instead, they tell each other.

This spring, Kyle Gilpin made a video describing the logic of his system. He used a two-dimensional drawing of a man to show how it works. So watch him here, doing (in a 2-D, very simple way) what those smart cubes did in the movie ... duplicating a man.

Right now, Daniela Rus' lab is working in two dimensions only, and they are only beginning to figure out how to downsize their cubes into sand grains. How long will that take? I figured something like 100 years — that's my normal guess for ideas that seem totally out there — but, in an interview on the Flexible Elements podcast series, Kyle Gilpin said he could imagine having a smart sand model in less than 10 years.

Really? Think of making an extra chair, wrench, plate, whatever you need whenever you need it, in a handy dandy bag of sand? Feels like a movie to me. But I don't know Kyle Gilpin. Either he's mad, or he's a very good engineer. (Or maybe he's both?)

Here's Next Media Animation's story — very short — describing the bag-of-sand concept:

This is the season of night noises, chirps, buzzes, little cries. The air is telling you, "Things are going on out here," and if you like you can step out onto the porch and do what the writer Rachel Carson did back in 1956: She played a hunting game. The rules were simple: You stand outdoors, near the house. You go quiet. When you hear something interesting, you either: a) take a flashlight and go hunt for it; or b) you don't go anywhere. You just imagine it.

The best find Rachel Carson ever made, she never found.

She was standing at the edge of her garden and noticed, somewhere in the chorus of nighttime crickets, birds and scurrying somethings, a very precise note, clear, like a 'ting!' It repeated.

Faint ... Barely-To-Be-Heard ...

"It is exactly the sound that should come," she wrote, "from a bell held in the hand of the tiniest elf, inexpressibly clear and silvery, so faint, so barely-to-be-heard that you hold your breath as you bend closer to the green glades from which the fairy chirping comes."

She dubbed it a "Fairy Bell Ringer."

But what was it, really?

A Teeny Elf With A Bell?

Rachel Carson was a scientist, a biologist. She'd already written a couple of best-sellers about life in the oceans, and a few years later she would write her classic, Silent Spring, about chemical pesticides and the ominous quiet that settles in after a place has been exposed to DDT. She knew how to look for little creatures, but this one, she decided after weeks trying, was too small, too shy. "I never found him," she wrote. "I'm not sure I want to." She kind of liked the idea that this one could tease her, draw her in, and never show itself.

Fairies With Mating Songs

She knew, of course, that it wasn't calling to her. No insect sings mating songs to a hairy, overwhelmingly humongous bipedal mammal (not even mosquitoes). We humans live in our world, insects in theirs. Rachel Carson knew that.

What's more, crickets don't sing joyously. They sing to survive. They are wired to do it. When Rachel heard them, "they were hard at work at the business of holding a place for their kind on this planet," says the author John Himmelman, in his book Cricket Radio. "I've no doubt she knew those crickets were not calling for her pleasure."

Yet she was deeply pleasured. She heard them go "ting, ting, ting," and the sound filled her with a crazy joy. The fact that the crickets were totally unaware of her, couldn't imagine her — that didn't matter. This wasn't about them; it was about her. She was describing her own delight. Sometimes, locked off from other creatures, that's the best we can do.

What Do Elves With Bells Sound Like?

Naturally some of her readers wanted to hear what she heard. "Tiny elves ringing bells" is such a gripping metaphor. For 50 years, both amateurs and scientists have searched the Northeast looking for candidates, and they've landed on two possibilities. Rachel was, they think, listening to either a Say's Trig (Anaxipha exigua) or a Tinkling Ground Cricket (Allonemobius tinnulus).

If you like, you can hear what a tinkling cricket sounds like right here.

I listened, and it sounds nice, but it's not as cool as a teeny fairy hitting a bell. Sometimes our language betrays us. Everybody, scientists included, want to talk to the world and have it talk back. We want to connect with the other creatures. We want the world to feel magical. But even when it isn't, we — scientists included — sometimes make it so.

Rachel Carson imagined elves with bells. Richard Alexander, a bug scientist who wrote the first great summary of insect sounds in 1960, imagined (or maybe almost had) a duet with a katydid. As described in David Rothenberg's new book, Bug Music, he was at home one day, banging on his typewriter, writing a manuscript about insects, when a real insect, a katydid from the yard, snuck into his studio. Katydids typically won't sing unless it's dark, but this one managed to find an unlit hiding place and heard Alexander going bangity-bang, bangity-bang, bangity-bang on the typewriter.

Bangity-Bang, Bang

The sounds apparently mimicked the basic bangity-bang, bang, bang, katydid, katydidn't rhythms that trigger a mating song. So when Alexander paused after a triple beat, the insect banged out its own triple rhythm, returning the call. Richard Alexander knew instantly what was going on, so he did another triple and got a triple back. Then he quickened his pace, bangity, bangity, bangity-bang; and the katydid bangity, bangity, bangitied him back — at the higher speed! Then Richard slowed. So did the insect. Katydids only sing when there's a pause in the communal song, when they have room to sing. Just to be sure, Richard Alexander banged nonstop on his typewriter, and the bug went silent.

That cinched it. For just a few minutes, a great scholar of bugdom had become a bug. He was singing with another katydid. That was Alexander's "elf with a bell" moment. Boundaries were broken. The lonely world had cracked just a little and there was joy in the house. We live and we die alone, of course, but every so often we imagine, or believe, or pretend to believe, that we can share.

Those are the moments that blaze.

Humans do it with smoke.

Dolphins do it with air.

With a little snort, dolphins can produce a nearly perfect "air" rings, (sophisticated non-dolphins called them toroidal vortices) which they turn into underwater toys.

If they leave the rings alone, (because air is lighter than water) the underwater circles will expand, rise to the surface and disappear — so very playful dolphins don't let them rise. In the video below, you can see them pushing the rings down, so the water pressure keeps them compact. Or — just for the fun of it, it seems — they will make a ring smaller by cutting it in two — with a quick bite!

So here the dolphin approaches ...

... then, (extremely quickly, so fast you can't see how) it takes a nip out of the bigger bubble, instantly restitching the two loose ends into a smaller, more compact bubble that keeps the bubble tight and lets them keep playing ...

Dolphins (I learned watching videos with dolphin expert Diana Reiss and Stanford bubble physicist Manu Prakash) sometimes blow two bubbles, giving the second one an extra push that sends its sailing right through the first — a kind of dolphin parlor trick.

But their favorite thing, it seems, is to use their noses (called rostrums) to spin the bubbles without ever touching them. They intentionally create turbulence in the surrounding water that can make the ring spin very tight, or they'll design a looser, wigglier bubble, move it along until it's about to burst, and just before it does, they open their mouths ...

... and swallow it!

While humans and dolphins obviously play with rings, it's possible humpback whales do this too. The video shows humpbacks sending air rings to the ocean surface, but in one of them, the giant underwater author suddenly pops up mid-ring to take what looks like a bow in front of a boat of whale-watchers.

Volcanoes, of course, don't take bows. But in any ring-blowing contest, Italy's live volcano, Mt. Etna, deserves some kind of trophy for Gorgeous Ring Production. This nearly perfect ring got coughed straight out of a mountain ...

The video ends with a complicated series of rings within rings produced by the Soviet Union in 1961. It is the biggest man-made toroidal vortex in human history, and it's the only ring in this video collection that made me wince.

I email. I search. I shop. I Facebook. I stream. I Skype. Every year I seem to do these things a little bit more. Stroke by stroke, as I slip deeper into the Internet's embrace, I find myself wondering:

"What would happen if the Internet went away?"

Can it? It was famously built to be indestructible, with no center, no hub, no "off" or "on" switch. It is, after all, a creature of the U.S. Defense Department, designed, supposedly, to survive a global war.

I know, of course, that it's voluntary. People can shut down their websites, information can disappear; some domains can peel away; its ocean cables are vulnerable to attack, but as to knocking out the whole thing, is that possible?

In his book An Optimist's Tour of the Future, writer Mark Stevenson asked Vint Cerf, one of the original team of computer scientists who put the thing together, if there was any way to pull the plug, in spite of the fact that it doesn't have a plug. Here's Vint's answer:

If every internet service provider in the world decided one day just to shut down the routers, that would pretty much screw the Internet ... So the answer is, it's technically possible, but would require cooperative action that's extremely unlikely."

There are tens of thousands of service providers around the planet. It's hard to imagine them all doing anything in unison. But what if they were targeted? What if a talented cyber-attack team went in with the intent to take knock the whole system down? Could they?

"Well," says Vint, "there are hostile actions going on every day all the time and they're capable of rendering parts of the Net inoperable but I don't think the machine would stop in and of itself ... We launched the Internet in January 1983, and as far as I'm aware the entire system has never been shut down since."

But what if he's wrong? Scientist David Eagleman has imagined four ways the Internet might be severely compromised. The first threat on his list is a powerful solar flare, knocking out multiple satellites simultaneously. That's the scenario you'll see here, in this short French video, directed by Francois Ferracci.

It's Oct. 10, 2020. A couple is on a date. They've only recently met, he's crazy about her, and he's snapping (or digitally producing) thousands of pictures — of her, of them, of Paris; he's the kind of lover who wants to record everything all the time. She's a little put off by his techie ardor, but he's obsessed — until, all of a sudden, his gadget freezes. He can't take pictures any more. The images he got start — they start to fade.

He's more than alarmed; he's paralyzed. She, however, she is going to teach him a lesson. With one simple gesture, she shows him something more permanent than the Internet. Something small and portable.

Take a look at this.

It's a dog drinking water. It's also the answer to a riddle. When you and I take a drink, we can lift a glass, hold it to our mouth, tilt and use gravity to pour the water in. Dogs can't do that. In a pinch, we can kneel down, put our mouth to the surface and suck water up (or, to be polite, use a straw). Dogs can't do that either. They don't have sucking ability.

Yet dogs do drink. Oddly enough, scientists weren't sure how they do it.

Once super high speed cameras became available, we could look more closely, and aiming at this dog, we can see it appears to bend its tongue backwards, like an inverted ladle. It dips down, scoops up some water, using its tongue as a pulley. This was a revelation. Because they are dogs, they drool, miss, splash the water — there's nothing polite about a dog drinking — but we seem to have our answer. They scoop! Dogs turn their tongues into ladles. Beautiful!

But wrong. When scientists looked more closely — when they measured — they found that the "scoop" is a delusion. Yes, as Eyder Peralta here at NPR reported a couple of years ago, and as you can see in this short video, the tongue does bend back, but notice a lot (most?) of the water never reaches the mouth. It just slips back to the bowl.

The tongue, it turns out, is not a ladle, but a sticky whip. A dog will extend — no, that's too polite a word — the dog will thrust its tongue into the water and then whip it back up, very, very fast. A stream of water attaches to and follows the tongue upward (adhesion and cohesion) — but only for a fraction of a second. Then gravity kicks in. The rising stream of water loses its upward momentum, and just as it's about to fall back into the bowl, at exactly the point where gravity is about to win, the dog snaps its mouth shut and swallows. Done. The motions are precise, even mathematical.

Engineers have worked out the equation, and when the math says, "Close Your Mouth!" that's when dogs do it. It's as if dogs understand fluid mechanics, and, in their messy doggie way, I guess they do.

Enough About Dogs. What About Cats?

Which brings us to cats.

Cats, it turns out, do the same thing, but being cats, they do it more carefully, more elegantly, more efficiently. No sloshing for them, no puddles outside the bowl. When MIT professor Roman Stocker (working with Pedro Reis) filmed Cutta Cutta, his own cat, drinking, they saw its tongue dip very gently at the milk — no doggie style tongue thrusting, no gouging — just a delicate lap ...

Cats do this very fast — four laps per second — too fast for us to see without a high speed camera. But now that we can measure what's going on, it appears that cats can take in more liquid with less spillage than dogs in the same unit of time. This suggests cats are more efficient (and therefore more intelligent?) lappers than dogs. (Of course, I am aware that the cat in the MIT study was owned — and maybe even loved — by the scientist doing the study. One could imagine, even in the oh-so-rational Civil & Environmental Engineering Department at MIT, Professor Stocker might have just the teeniest cat-admiring bias. I'm waiting for cat-drinking studies done by dog-owning scientists before I'm completely convinced.)

And Now ... The Champions!

But before we get too excited by cats behaving elegantly, I want to move on to pigeons. Cats, I know, eat pigeons. But I recently met three pigeons, who for my money, would embarrass any cat (and every dog) with their extraordinary drinking skills. These three may be the smartest beverage consumers in the small-animal kingdom.

They live (or lived — this picture was taken four years ago) in Brisbane, Australia, and apparently frequented a shopping mall where there is a water fountain. According to the always fascinating blogger Antranik ("Anto" for short), these pigeons watched humans pushing a lever to release water and figured out how water fountains work. They then took turns.

In this shot you see one pigeon sitting on the lever, weighing it down to release some water. The middle one takes a semi-bath dodging in and out of the water, and the third one, on the left, is taking a drink. Then they switched.

Say what you will about sloppy dogs or elegant cats, these three are the Plato, Aristotle and Socrates of the drinking world. Send them to a diner. I bet they'd soon be sucking on straws.

Ask a great inventor to invent, and that's exactly what he'll do. Sometimes the ideas pop out like cannon bursts: "consider this ... " or "maybe this?" or "Wait! How about THIS!"

Ben Franklin did that with balloons.

In the 1780s, Franklin was America's ambassador to France, living in Paris, where all over town, people were experimenting with balloon flight. They'd constructed car-sized baskets, packed in bottles of champagne, iced lemonade, added packets of roast duck sandwiches, set up in a public park, fired up the gas, inflated big balloons and soared off — floating over the town, waving, doing acrobatics, getting in trouble, snagging onto roofs, having near misses. Everybody could see them. Everybody talked about them. Europe was having its first wave of "Ballomania," writes historian Richard Holmes. Balloons were the 18th century's version of space travel, our first leap into the sky.

But they couldn't be directed. The first "aerialists" would just fly up and go wherever the wind blew. Balloons weren't like horses or boats. You couldn't use them to get somewhere. So what, really, were they good for, asked Sir Joseph Banks, president of the Royal Society in London. Anything useful? Anything practical?

That's where Franklin jumped in. "Practical" was his territory. His mind wandered freely, and he liked to solve problems. So here, culled from Franklin's letters, are his Balloon Ideas, many of them proposed to Sir Joseph, as reported by Richard Holmes.

Need to send a message to a neighbor? You have a footman? Good. All you do is attach him to a hydrogen balloon, which will make him much lighter, (says Holmes quoting Franklin,) "so his body weight was reduced to 'perhaps 8 or 10 Pounds,' " and so made capable of running in a straight line in leaps and bounds "across Countries as fast as the Wind, and over Hedges, Ditches & even Water ... " Bingo! You've just created the 18th century version of an instant message!

I don't know why Franklin called it an "elbow" chair, but here's the gist. You are at a fair. Imagine lots and lots of people stuck on the ground looking for something to do. But look up. There's an easy chair hooked to a flock of balloons, parked in the sky, with a great view of a village, town, meadow, whatever. The plan? You pull the chair down to the ground, invite the tourist to sit and then winch "the picturesque spectator 'a mile high for a Guinea' to see the view." A revenue earner — like the Eiffel Tower without the tower.

Holmes describes it as "Franklin's patent balloon icebox." This being an era before refrigeration, imagine someone with five ducks, freshly killed. Rather than eat them right away, the hunter would like to store them, but where? Well, the higher you go, the cooler it gets, so, thought Dr. Franklin, why not create a container in the sky? "People will keep such Globes anchored in the Air, to which by Pullies they may draw up Game to be preserved in the Cool, & Water to be frozen when Ice is wanted." The Original Frigidaire.

When Franklin moved back to Philadelphia in 1785, he had trouble walking. He'd developed a bad case of gout. To get to the Philadelphia State Assembly on working days, he arranged to be "lifted by four stout assistants" on a sedan chair. This apparently embarrassed him, because he suggested harnessing his sedan to small hydrogen balloon "sufficiently large to raise me from the ground." This, he thought, would make him so much lighter he imagined himself floating, "being led by a string held by one man walking on the ground." (Richard Holmes calculated that a single balloon, ten feet across, containing one thousand cubic feet of hydrogen, would have done what Franklin imagined. But it doesn't seem they ever tried it.)

Not To Mention ...

He had other ideas. I've skipped over the obvious ones, using balloons to transport infantry across rivers and channels, to predict the weather, for military intelligence. He was one of those guys that if you gave him a problem, he'd think it over, and out would pour a crazy stream of stories, get-rich-quick schemes, fairy tales, adventures and solutions to problems you'd never known you had. He had what you might call "a mind wide-open" ready, like those balloons, to fly anywhere ...

Richard Holmes' forthcoming book on ballooning (to be released in America next fall) is called Falling Upwards: How We Took To The Air. If you'd like to imagine flying over Paris carried by a gaggle of balloons, here's the classic short French film The Red Balloon, (The whole thing! It's not too long.) in which a host of balloons rescue a little boy from some bullies and pull him up into the sky to take him ... well, I'm not sure where they're going. Maybe to balloon heaven. Directed by Albert Lamorisse, this film won both an Oscar and the Palm d'Or for short films at Cannes in 1956 and it gives me just a hint, perhaps a more heart-rending hint, of what Franklin saw sailing overhead in the 1780s.

If this wasn't a science page, if this happened 3,000 years ago in, say, a Middle Eastern desert, I would call it a Miracle. But it's not. It's just a plain, ordinary moment of "wow!"

First, the beginner's version. A man takes a bunch of metronomes, sets them ticking in different ways, then — and this is the crucial part — he lifts them collectively off the table, so their different motions now start to offset each other. And this happens:

But why? How does it work, you may be asking. I wondered too, and simply stated, what we have here is the transfer of momentum resulting in the alignment of motion. (Don't be afraid. Keep reading.)

Even more simply stated: As the metronomes tick back and forth, they affect the table, and because the table is designed to absorb the motion of the metronomes, the table itself starts to move. Now that the table is rocking ever so slightly, it begins to affect the metronomes on top. Metronomes that are moving with the table keep doing that. Metronomes not in sync with the table have their motions dampened, then countered, until they do it "the table's way." Eventually all the metronomes come into alignment.

That's what you saw in our small, chamber music version. Now we're going symphonic.

This time, we'll have a much bigger table with 32 brightly colored metronomes — a Mormon Tabernacle Choir of metronomes — all misaligned. It will take two minutes for most of them to fall into line. But there's one gloriously stubborn metronome in the second row on the extreme right that fights the mob and won't conform. In fact, it cleverly chooses to follow the beat but in exactly the wrong direction. I thought maybe it would be allowed to stay that way, a Minority Of One ... persisting against the tide, but ... well ... you'll see ...

They once made a movie about that stubborn metronome. It was called One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, and the metronome was played by Jack Nicholson.

This being Commencement Time, I'd like to share this gently dramatized version of David Foster Wallace's 2005 address to the graduates of Kenyon College, in which he makes the argument that when you are dog-tired, stuck in traffic, waiting in the supermarket line, when everything is flat, dull, empty, purposeless, this is where being educated helps. Because you went to college and learned different ways to think about things, you have the muscles. You exercised them at school. You can stand in that supermarket line, surrounded by irritating, equally bored people, and if you want, you can imagine them beautiful or gentle or helpless — even if they're not. You have the choice. Your education gives you the option to see things from several perspectives. You can call it delusional. Or you can call it hope. Or you can call it a form of pain relief from your own pain. Whatever you call it, with it, you are unshackled. That's what a college education can give you, says David — a chance to fly free.

This video was created by the design team at The Glossary, (a "fine purveyor of stimulating videograms") in Los Angeles. You can find them here.