These stunning images trace ships’ routes as they move

As we run, drive, bike, and fly, we leave behind telltale marks of our movements on Earth—if you know where to look. Physical tracks, thermal signatures, and chemical traces can reveal where we’ve been. But another type of trail we leave comes from the radio signals emitted by the cars, planes, trains, and boats we use.

On airplanes, technology called ADS-B (Automatic Dependent Surveillance–Broadcast) provides real-time location, identification, speed, and orientation data. For ships at sea, that function is performed by the AIS (Automatic Identification System).

Operating at 161.975 and 162.025 megahertz, AIS transmitters broadcast a ship’s identification number, name, call sign, length and beam, type, and antenna location every six minutes. Ship location, position time stamp, and direction are transmitted more frequently. The primary purpose of AIS is maritime safety—it helps prevent collisions, assists in rescues, and provides insight into the impact of ship traffic on marine life. US Coast Guard regulations say that generally, private boats under 65 feet in length are not required to use AIS, but most commercial vessels are. Unlike ADS-B in planes, AIS can be turned off only in rare circumstances. 

A variety of sectors use AIS data for many different applications, including monitoring ship traffic to avoid disruption of undersea internet cables, identifying whale strikes, and studying the footprint of underwater noise.

Using the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association’s Marine Cadastre tool, you can download 16 years of detailed daily ship movements, as well as “transit count” maps generated from a year’s worth of data showing each ship’s accumulated paths. The data is collected entirely from ground-based stations along the US coasts.

I downloaded all of 2023’s transit count maps and loaded them up in geographic information system software called QGIS to visualize this year of marine traffic.

The maps are abstract and electric. With landmasses removed, the ship traces resemble long-exposure photos of sparklers, high-energy particle collisions, or strands of fiber-optic wire.

DATA: NOAA; MAP: JON KEEGAN / BEAUTIFUL PUBLIC DATA

DATA: NOAA; MAP: JON KEEGAN / BEAUTIFUL PUBLIC DATA

DATA: NOAA; MAP: JON KEEGAN / BEAUTIFUL PUBLIC DATA

DATA: NOAA; MAP: JON KEEGAN / BEAUTIFUL PUBLIC DATA

Zooming in on these maps, you might see strange geometric patterns of perfect circles, or lines in a grid. Some of these are fishing grounds, others are scientific surveys mapping the seafloor, and others represent boats going to and from offshore oil rigs, especially off Louisiana’s gulf coast.

Hiding in plain sight

Having a global, near-real-time system for tracking the precise movements of all ships at sea sounds like a great innovation—unless you’re trying to keep your ships’ movements and cargoes secret.

In 2023, Bloomberg investigated how Russia evaded sanctions on its oil exports after the invasion of Ukraine by “spoofing”—transmitting fake AIS data—to mislead observers. Tracking a fleet of rusting ships of questionable seaworthiness, reporters compared AIS data with what they actually saw on the sea—and discovered that the ships weren’t where the data said they were. 

Monitoring the fishing industry

Clusters of fishing vessels gravitating toward known fishing grounds create some of the most interesting patterns on the maps. 

Global Fishing Watch is an international nonprofit that uses AIS to monitor the fishing industry, seeking to protect marine life from overfishing. But it says that only 2% of fishing vessels use AIS transmitters. 

The organization, which is backed by Google, the ocean conservation group Oceana, and the satellite imagery company SkyTruth, combines AIS data with satellite imagery and uses machine learning to classify the types of fishing technology being used. 

In a press release announcing the creation of Global Fishing Watch, John Amos, the president and founder of SkyTruth, said: “So much of what happens out on the high seas is invisible, and that has been a huge barrier to understanding and showing the world what’s at stake for the ocean.” 

A version of this story appeared in Beautiful Public Data (beautifulpublicdata.com), a newsletter that curates visually interesting datasets collected by government agencies.

How Silicon Valley is disrupting democracy

The internet loves a good neologism, especially if it can capture a purported vibe shift or explain a new trend. In 2013, the columnist Adrian Wooldridge coined a word that eventually did both. Writing for the Economist, he warned of the coming “techlash,” a revolt against Silicon Valley’s rich and powerful fueled by the public’s growing realization that these “sovereigns of cyberspace” weren’t the benevolent bright-future bringers they claimed to be. 

While Wooldridge didn’t say precisely when this techlash would arrive, it’s clear today that a dramatic shift in public opinion toward Big Tech and its leaders did in fact ­happen—and is arguably still happening. Say what you will about the legions of Elon Musk acolytes on X, but if an industry and its executives can bring together the likes of Elizabeth Warren and Lindsey Graham in shared condemnation, it’s definitely not winning many popularity contests.   

To be clear, there have always been critics of Silicon Valley’s very real excesses and abuses. But for the better part of the last two decades, many of those voices of dissent were either written off as hopeless Luddites and haters of progress or drowned out by a louder and far more numerous group of techno-optimists. Today, those same critics (along with many new ones) have entered the fray once more, rearmed with popular Substacks, media columns, and—increasingly—book deals.

Two of the more recent additions to the flourishing techlash genre—Rob Lalka’s The Venture Alchemists: How Big Tech Turned Profits into Power and Marietje Schaake’s The Tech Coup: How to Save Democracy from Silicon Valley—serve as excellent reminders of why it started in the first place. Together, the books chronicle the rise of an industry that is increasingly using its unprecedented wealth and power to undermine democracy, and they outline what we can do to start taking some of that power back.

To his credit, Lalka takes this medley of tech titans and uses their origin stories and interrelationships to explain how the so-called Silicon Valley mindset (mind virus?) became not just a fixture in California’s Santa Clara County but also the preeminent way of thinking about success and innovation across America.

This approach to doing business, usually cloaked in a barrage of cringey innovation-speak—disrupt or be disrupted, move fast and break things, better to ask for forgiveness than permission—can often mask a darker, more authoritarian ethos, according to Lalka. 

One of the nine entrepreneurs in the book, Peter Thiel, has written that “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible” and that “competition [in business] is for losers.” Many of the others think that all technological progress is inherently good and should be pursued at any cost and for its own sake. A few also believe that privacy is an antiquated concept—even an illusion—and that their companies should be free to hoard and profit off our personal data. Most of all, though, Lalka argues, these men believe that their newfound power should be unconstrained by governments, ­regulators, or anyone else who might have the gall to impose some limitations.

Where exactly did these beliefs come from? Lalka points to people like the late free-market economist Milton Friedman, who famously asserted that a company’s only social responsibility is to increase profits, as well as to Ayn Rand, the author, philosopher, and hero to misunderstood teenage boys everywhere who tried to turn selfishness into a virtue. 

COLUMBIA BUSINESS SCHOOL PUBLISHING, 2024

It’s a somewhat reductive and not altogether original explanation of Silicon Valley’s libertarian inclinations. What ultimately matters, though, is that many of these “values” were subsequently encoded into the DNA of the companies these men founded and funded—companies that today shape how we communicate with one another, how we share and consume news, and even how we think about our place in the world. 

The Venture Alchemists is strongest when it’s describing the early-stage antics and on-campus controversies that shaped these young entrepreneurs or, in many cases, simply reveal who they’ve always been. Lalka is a thorough and tenacious researcher, as the book’s 135 pages of endnotes suggest. And while nearly all these stories have been told before in other books and articles, he still manages to provide new perspectives and insights from sources like college newspapers and leaked documents. 

One thing the book is particularly effective at is deflating the myth that these entrepreneurs were somehow gifted seers of (and investors in) a future the rest of us simply couldn’t comprehend or predict. 

Sure, someone like Thiel made what turned out to be a savvy investment in Facebook early on, but he also made some very costly mistakes with that stake. As Lalka points out, Thiel’s Founders Fund dumped tens of millions of shares shortly after Facebook went public, and Thiel himself went from owning 2.5% of the company in 2012 to 0.000004% less than a decade later (around the same time Facebook hit its trillion-dollar valuation). Throw in his objectively terrible wagers in 2008, 2009, and beyond, when he effectively shorted what turned out to be one of the longest bull markets in world history, and you get the impression he’s less oracle and more ideologue who happened to take some big risks that paid off. 

One of Lalka’s favorite mantras throughout The Venture Alchemists is that “words matter.” Indeed, he uses a lot of these entrepreneurs’ own words to expose their hypocrisy, bullying, juvenile contrarianism, casual racism, and—yes—outright greed and self-interest. It is not a flattering picture, to say the least. 

Unfortunately, instead of simply letting those words and deeds speak for themselves, Lalka often feels the need to interject with his own, frequently enjoining readers against ­finger-pointing or judging these men too harshly even after he’s chronicled their many transgressions. Whether this is done to try to convey some sense of objectivity or simply to remind readers that these entrepreneurs are complex and complicated men making difficult decisions, it doesn’t work. At all. 

For one thing, Lalka clearly has his own strong opinions about the behavior of these entrepreneurs—opinions he doesn’t try to disguise. At one point in the book he suggests that Kalanick’s alpha-male, dominance-at-any-cost approach to running Uber is “almost, but not quite” like rape, which is maybe not the comparison you’d make if you wanted to seem like an arbiter of impartiality. And if he truly wants readers to come to a different conclusion about these men, he certainly doesn’t provide many reasons for doing so. Simply telling us to “judge less, and discern more” seems worse than a cop-out. It comes across as “almost, but not quite” like victim-blaming—as if we’re somehow just as culpable as they are for using their platforms and buying into their self-mythologizing. 

“In many ways, Silicon Valley has become the antithesis of what its early pioneers set out to be.”

Marietje Schaake

Equally frustrating is the crescendo of empty platitudes that ends the book. “The technologies of the future must be pursued thoughtfully, ethically, and cautiously,” Lalka says after spending 313 pages showing readers how these entrepreneurs have willfully ignored all three adverbs. What they’ve built instead are massive wealth-creation machines that divide, distract, and spy on us. Maybe it’s just me, but that kind of behavior seems ripe not only for judgment, but also for action.

So what exactly do you do with a group of men seemingly incapable of serious self-reflection—men who believe unequivocally in their own greatness and who are comfortable making decisions on behalf of hundreds of millions of people who did not elect them, and who do not necessarily share their values?

You regulate them, of course. Or at least you regulate the companies they run and fund. In Marietje Schaake’s The Tech Coup, readers are presented with a road map for how such regulation might take shape, along with an eye-opening account of just how much power has already been ceded to these corporations over the past 20 years.

There are companies like NSO Group, whose powerful Pegasus spyware tool has been sold to autocrats, who have in turn used it to crack down on dissent and monitor their critics. Billionaires are now effectively making national security decisions on behalf of the United States and using their social media companies to push right-wing agitprop and conspiracy theories, as Musk does with his Starlink satellites and X. Ride-sharing companies use their own apps as propaganda tools and funnel hundreds of millions of dollars into ballot initiatives to undo laws they don’t like. The list goes on and on. According to Schaake, this outsize and largely unaccountable power is changing the fundamental ways that democracy works in the United States. 

“In many ways, Silicon Valley has become the antithesis of what its early pioneers set out to be: from dismissing government to literally taking on equivalent functions; from lauding freedom of speech to becoming curators and speech regulators; and from criticizing government overreach and abuse to accelerating it through spyware tools and opaque algorithms,” she writes.

Schaake, who’s a former member of the European Parliament and the current international policy director at Stanford University’s Cyber Policy Center, is in many ways the perfect chronicler of Big Tech’s power grab. Beyond her clear expertise in the realms of governance and technology, she’s also Dutch, which makes her immune to the distinctly American disease that seems to equate extreme wealth, and the power that comes with it, with virtue and intelligence. 

This resistance to the various reality-distortion fields emanating from Silicon Valley plays a pivotal role in her ability to see through the many justifications and self-serving solutions that come from tech leaders themselves. Schaake understands, for instance, that when someone like OpenAI’s Sam Altman gets in front of Congress and begs for AI regulation, what he’s really doing is asking Congress to create a kind of regulatory moat between his company and any other startups that might threaten it, not acting out of some genuine desire for accountability or governmental guardrails. 

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS, 2024

Like Shoshana Zuboff, the author of The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, Schaake believes that “the digital” should “live within democracy’s house”—that is, technologies should be developed within the framework of democracy, not the other way around. To accomplish this realignment, she offers a range of solutions, from banning what she sees as clearly antidemocratic technologies (like face-recognition software and other spyware tools) to creating independent teams of expert advisors to members of Congress (who are often clearly out of their depth when attempting to understand technologies and business models). 

Predictably, all this renewed interest in regulation has inspired its own backlash in recent years—a kind of “tech revanchism,” to borrow a phrase from the journalist James Hennessy. In addition to familiar attacks, such as trying to paint supporters of the techlash as somehow being antitechnology (they’re not), companies are also spending massive amounts of money to bolster their lobbying efforts. 

Some venture capitalists, like LinkedIn cofounder Reid Hoffman, who made big donations to the Kamala Harris presidential campaign, wanted to evict Federal Trade Commission chair Lina Khan, claiming that regulation is killing innovation (it isn’t) and removing the incentives to start a company (it’s not). And then of course there’s Musk, who now seems to be in a league of his own when it comes to how much influence he may exert over Donald Trump and the government that his companies have valuable contracts with.

What all these claims of victimization and subsequent efforts to buy their way out of regulatory oversight miss is that there’s actually a vast and fertile middle ground between simple techno­-optimism and techno-skepticism. As the New Yorker contributor Cal Newport and others have noted, it’s entirely possible to support innovations that can significantly improve our lives without accepting that every popular invention is good or inevitable. 

Regulating Big Tech will be a crucial part of leveling the playing field and ensuring that the basic duties of a democracy can be fulfilled. But as both Lalka and Schaake suggest, another battle may prove even more difficult and contentious. This one involves undoing the flawed logic and cynical, self-serving philosophies that have led us to the point where we are now. 

What if we admitted that constant bacchanals of disruption are in fact not all that good for our planet or our brains? What if, instead of “creative destruction,” we started fetishizing stability, and in lieu of putting “dents in the universe,” we refocused our efforts on fixing what’s already broken? What if—and hear me out—we admitted that technology might not be the solution to every problem we face as a society, and that while innovation and technological change can undoubtedly yield societal benefits, they don’t have to be the only measures of economic success and quality of life? 

When ideas like these start to sound less like radical concepts and more like common sense, we’ll know the techlash has finally achieved something truly revolutionary. 

Bryan Gardiner is a writer based in Oakland, California.

The arrhythmia of our current age

Thumpa-thumpa, thumpa-thumpa, bump, 

thumpa, skip, 

thumpa-thump, pause …

My heart wasn’t supposed to be beating like this. Way too fast, with bumps, pauses, and skips. On my smart watch, my pulse was topping out at 210 beats per minute and jumping every which way as my chest tightened. Was I having a heart attack? 

The day was July 4, 2022, and I was on a 12-mile bike ride on Martha’s Vineyard. I had just pedaled past Inkwell Beach, where swimmers sunbathed under colorful umbrellas, and into a hot, damp headwind blowing off the sea. That’s when I first sensed a tugging in my chest. My legs went wobbly. My head started to spin. I pulled over, checked my watch, and discovered that I was experiencing atrial fibrillation—a fancy name for a type of arrhythmia. The heart beats, but not in the proper time. Atria are the upper chambers of the heart; fibrillation means an attack of “uncoordinated electrical activity.”   

I recount this story less to describe a frightening moment for me personally than to consider the idea of arrhythmia—a critical rhythm of life suddenly going rogue and unpredictable, triggered by … what? That July afternoon was steamy and over 90 °F, but how many times had I biked in heat far worse? I had recently recovered from a not-so-bad bout of covid—my second. Plus, at age 64, I wasn’t a kid anymore, even if I didn’t always act accordingly.  

Whatever the proximal cause, what was really gripping me on July 4, 2022, was the idea of arrhythmia as metaphor. That a pulse once seemingly so steady was now less sure, and how this wobbliness might be extrapolated into a broader sense of life in the 2020s. I know it’s quite a leap from one man’s abnormal ticker to the current state of an entire species and era, but that’s where my mind went as I was taken to the emergency department at Martha’s Vineyard Hospital. 

Maybe you feel it, too—that the world seems to have skipped more than a beat or two as demagogues rant and democracy shudders, hurricanes rage, glaciers dissolve, and sunsets turn a deeper orange as fires spew acrid smoke into the sky, and into our lungs. We can’t stop watching tiny screens where influencers pitch products we don’t need alongside news about senseless wars that destroy, murder, and maim tens-of-thousands. Poverty remains intractable for billions. So does loneliness and a rising crisis in mental health even as we fret over whether AI is going to save us or turn us into pets; and on and on.

For most of my life, I’ve leaned into optimism, confident that things will work out in the end. But as a nurse admitted me and attached ECG leads to my chest, I felt a wave of doubt about the future. Lying on a gurney, I watched my pulse jump up and down on a monitor, erratically and still way too fast, as another nurse poked a needle into my hand to deliver an IV bag of saline that would hydrate my blood vessels. Soon after, a young, earnest doctor came in to examine me, and I heard the word uttered for the first time. 

“You are having an arrhythmia,” he said.

Even with my heart beating rat-a-tat-tat, I couldn’t help myself. Intrigued by the word, which I had heard before but had never really heard, I pulled out the phone that is always at my side and looked it up.

ar·rhyth·mi·a
Noun: “a condition in which the heart beats with an irregular or abnormal  rhythm.” Greek a-, “without,” and rhuthmos, “rhythm.”

I lay back and closed my eyes and let this Greek origin of the word roll around in my mind as I repeated it several times—rhuthmos, rhuthmos, rhuthmos.

Rhythm, rhythm, rhythm …

I tapped my finger to follow the beat of my heart, but of course I couldn’t, because my heart wasn’t beating in the steady and predictable manner that my finger could easily have followed before July 4, 2022. After all, my heart was built to tap out in a rhythm, a rhuthmos—not an arhuthmos. 

Later I discovered that the Greek rhuthmos, ῥυθμός, like the English rhythm, refers not only to heartbeats but to any steady motion, symmetry, or movement. For the ancient Greeks this word was closely tied to music and dance; to the physics of vibration and polarity; to a state of balance and harmony. The concept of rhuthmos was incorporated into Greek classical sculptures using a strict formula of proportions called the Kanon, an example being the Doryphoros (Spear Bearer) originally by the fifth century sculptor Polykleitos. Standing today in the Acropolis Museum in Athens this statue appears to be moving in an easy fluidity, a rhuthmos that’s somehow drawn out of the milky-colored stone. 

The Greeks also thought of rhuthmos as harmony and balance in emotions, with Greek playwrights penning tragedies where the rhuthmos of life, nature, and the gods goes awry. “In this rhythm, I am caught,” cries Prometheus in Aeschylus’s Prometheus Bound, where rhuthmos becomes a steady, unrelenting punishment inflicted by Zeus when Prometheus introduces fire to humans, providing them with a tool previously reserved for the gods. Each day Prometheus, who is chained to a rock, has his liver eaten out by an eagle, only to have the liver grow back each night, a cycle repeated day after day in a steady beat for an eternity of penance, pain, and vexation.

In modern times, cardiologists have used rhuthmos to refer to the physical beating of the muscle in our chests that mixes oxygen and blood and pumps it through 60,000 miles of veins, arteries, and capillaries to fingertips, toe tips, frontal cortex, kidneys, eyes, everywhere. In 2006, the journal Rhythmos launched as a quarterly medical publication that focuses on cardiac electrophysiology. This subspecialty of cardiology involves the electrical signals animating the heart with pulses that keep it beating steadily—or, for me in the summer of 2022, not. 

The question remained: Why?

As far as I know, I wasn’t being punished by Zeus, although I couldn’t entirely rule out the possibility that I had annoyed some god or goddess and was catching hell for it. Possibly covid was the culprit—that microscopic bundle of RNA with the power of a god to mess with us mortals—but who knows? As science learns more about this pernicious bug, evidence suggests that it can play havoc with the nervous system and tissue that usually make sure the heart stays in rhuthmos. 

A-fib also can be instigated by even moderate imbibing of alcohol, by aging, and sometimes by a gene called KCNQ1. Mutations in this gene “appear to increase the flow of potassium ions through the channel formed with the KCNQ1 protein,” according to MedlinePlus, part of the National Library of Medicine. “The enhanced ion transport can disrupt the heart’s normal rhythm, resulting in atrial fibrillation.” Was a miscreant  mutation playing a role in my arrhythmia?

Angst and fear can influence A-fib too. I had plenty of both during the pandemic, along with most of humanity. Lest we forget—and we’re trying really, really hard to forget—covid anxiety continued to rage in the summer of 2022, even after vaccines had arrived and most of the world had reopened. 

Back then, the damage done to fragile brains forced to shelter in place for months and months was still fresh. Cable news and social media continued to amplify the terror of seeing so many people dead or facing permanent impairment. Politics also seemed out of control, with demagogues—another Greek word—running amok. Shootings, invasions, hatred, and fury seemed to lurk everywhere. This is one reason I stopped following the news for days at a time—something I had never done, as a journalist and news junkie. I felt that my fragile heart couldn’t bear so much visceral tragedy, so much arhuthmos.

We each have our personal stories from those dark days. For me, covid came early in 2020 and led to a spring and summer with a pervasive brain fog, trouble breathing, and eventually a depression of the sort that I had never experienced before. At the same time, I had friends who ended up in the ICU, and I knew people whose parents and other relatives had passed. My mother was dying of dementia, and my father had been in and out of the ICU a half-dozen times with myasthenia gravis, an autoimmune disease that can be fatal. This family dissolution had started before covid hit, but the pandemic made the implosion of my nuclear family seem worse and undoubtedly contributed to the failure of my heart’s pulse to stay true. 

Likewise, the wider arhuthmos some of us are feeling now began long before the novel coronavirus shut down ordinary life in March 2020. Statistics tell us that anxiety, stress, depression, and general mental unhealthiness have been steadily ticking up for years. This seems to suggest that something bigger has been going on for some time—a collective angst that seems to point to the darker side of modern life itself. 

Don’t get me wrong. Modern life has provided us with spectacular benefits—Manhattan, Boeing 787 Dreamliners, IMAX films, cappuccinos, and switches and dials on our walls that instantly illuminate or heat a room. Unlike our ancestors, most of us no longer need to fret about when we will eat next or whether we’ll find a safe place to sleep, or worry that a saber-toothed tiger will eat us. Nor do we need to experience an A-fib attack without help from an eager and highly trained young doctor, an emergency department, and an IV to pump hydration into our veins. 

But there have been trade-offs. New anxieties and threats have emerged to make us feel uneasy and arrhythmic. These start with an uneven access to things like emergency departments, eager young doctors, shelter, and food—which can add to anxiety not only for those without them but also for anyone who finds this situation unacceptable. Even being on the edge of need can make the heart gambol about.

Consider, too, the basic design features of modern life, which tend toward straight lines—verticals and horizontals. This comes from an instinct we have to tidy up and organize things, and from the fact that verticals and horizontals in architecture are stable and functional. 

All this straightness, however, doesn’t always sit well with brains that evolved to see patterns and shapes in the natural world, which isn’t horizontal and vertical. Our ancestors looked out over vistas of trees and savannas and mountains that were not made from straight lines. Crooked lines, a bending tree, the fuzzy contour of a grassy vista, a horizon that bobs and weaves—these feel right to our primordial brains. We are comforted by the curve of a robin’s breast and the puffs and streaks and billows of clouds high in the sky, the soft earth under our feet when we walk.

Not to overly romanticize nature, which can be violent, unforgiving, and deadly. Devastating storms and those predators with sharp teeth were a major reason why our forebears lived in trees and caves and built stout huts surrounded by walls. Homo sapiens also evolved something crucial to our survival—optimism that they would survive and prevail. This has been a powerful tool—one of the reasons we are able to forge ahead, forget the horrors of pandemics and plagues, build better huts, and learn to make cappuccinos on demand. 

As one of the great optimists of our day, Kevin Kelly, has said: “Over the long term, the future is decided by optimists.” 

But is everything really okay in this future that our ancestors built for us? Is the optimism that’s hardwired into us and so important for survival and the rise of civilization one reason for the general anxiety we’re feeling in a future that has in some crucial ways turned out less ideal than those who constructed it had hoped? 

At the very least, modern life seems to be downplaying elements that are as critical to our feelings of safety as sturdy walls, standing armies, and clean ECGs—and truly more crucial to our feelings of happiness and prosperity than owning two cars or showing off the latest swimwear on Miami Beach. These fundamentals include love and companionship, which statistics tell us are in short supply. Today millions have achieved the once optimistic dream of living like minor pharaohs and kings in suburban tract homes and McMansions, yet inadvertently many find themselves separated from the companionship and community that are basic human cravings. 

Modern science and technology can be dazzling and good and useful. But they’ve also been used to design things that hurt us broadly while spectacularly benefiting just a few of us. We have let the titans of social media hijack our genetic cravings to be with others, our need for someone to love and to love us, so that we will stay glued to our devices, even in the ED when we think we might be having a heart attack. Processed foods are designed to play on our body’s craving for sweets and animal fat, something that evolution bestowed so we would choose food that is nutritious and safe to eat (mmm, tastes good) and not dangerous (ugh, sour milk). But now their easy abundance overwhelms our bodies and makes many of us sick. 

We invented money so that acquiring things and selling what we make in order to live better would be faster and easier. In the process, we also invented a whole new category of anxiety—about money. We worry about having too little of it and sometimes too much; we fear that someone will steal it or trick us into spending it on things we don’t need. Some of us feel guilty about not spending enough of it on feeding the hungry or repairing our climate. Money also distorts elections, which require huge amounts of it. You may have gotten a text message just now, asking for some to support a candidate you don’t even like. 

The irony is that we know how to fix at least some of what makes us on edge. For instance, we know we shouldn’t drive gas-guzzling SUVs and that we should stop looking at endless perfect kitchens, too-perfect influencers, and 20-second rants on TikTok. We can feel helpless even as new ideas and innovations proliferate. This may explain one of the great contradictions of this age of arrhythmia—one demonstrated in a 2023 UNESCO global survey about climate change that questioned 3,000 young people from 80 different countries, aged 16 to 24. Not surprisingly, 57% were “eco-anxious.” But an astonishing 67% were “eco-optimistic,” meaning many were both anxious and hopeful. 

Me too. 

All this anxiety and optimism have been hard on our hearts—literally and metaphorically. Too much worry can cause this fragile muscle to break down, to lose its rhythm. So can too much of modern life. Cardiovascular disease remains the No. 1 killer of adults, in the US and most of the world, with someone in America dying of it every 33 seconds, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The incidence of A-fib has tripled in the past 50 years (possibly because we’re diagnosing it more); it afflicted almost 50 million people globally in 2016.

For me, after that initial attack on Martha’s Vineyard, the A-fib episodes kept coming. I charted them on my watch, the blips and pauses in my pulse, the moments when my heart raced at over 200 beats per minute, causing my chest to tighten and my throat to feel raw. Sometimes I tasted blood, or thought I did. I kept bicycling through the summer and fall of 2022, gingerly watching my heart rate to see if I could keep the beats from taking a sudden leap from normal to out of control. 

When an arrhythmic episode happened, I struggled to catch my breath as I  pulled over to the roadside to wait for the misfirings to pass. Sometimes my mind grew groggy, and I got confused. It became difficult during these cardio-disharmonious moments to maintain my cool with other people. I became less able to process the small setbacks that we all face every day—things I previously had been able to let roll off my back. 

Early in 2023 I had my heart checked by a cardiologist. He conducted an echocardiogram and had me jog on a treadmill hooked up to monitors. “There has been no damage to your heart,” he declared after getting the results, pointing to a black-and-white video of my heart muscle contracting and constricting, drawing in blood and pumping it back out again. I felt relieved, although he also said that the A-fib was likely to persist, so he prescribed a blood thinner called Eliquis as a precaution to prevent stroke. Apparently, during unnatural pauses in one’s heartbeat blood can clot and send tiny, scab-like fragments into the brain, potentially clogging up critical capillaries and other blood vessels. “You don’t want that to happen,” said the cardiologist.

Toward the end of my heart exam, the doctor mentioned a possible fix for my arrhythmia. I was skeptical, although what he proposed turned out to be one of the great pluses of being alive right now—a solution that was unavailable to my ancestors or even to my grandparents. “It’s called a heart ablation,” he said. The procedure, a simple operation, redirects errant electric signals in the heart muscle to restore a normal pattern of beating. Doctors will run a tube into your heart, find the abnormal tissue throwing off the rhythm, and zap it with either extreme heat, cold, or (the newest option) electrical pulses. There are an estimated 240,000 such procedures a year in the United States. 

“Can you really do that?” I asked.

“We can,” said the doctor. “It doesn’t always work the first time. Sometimes you need a second or third procedure, but the success rate is high.”

A few weeks later, I arrived at Beth Israel Hospital in Boston at 11 a.m. on a Tuesday. My first cardiologist was unavailable to do the procedure, so after being prepped in the pre-op area I was greeted by Andre d’Avila, a specialist in electrocardiology, who explained again how the procedure worked. He said  that he and an electrophysiology fellow would be inserting long, snakelike catheters through the femoral veins in my groin that contain wires tipped with a tiny ultrasound camera and a cauterizer that would be used to selectively and carefully burn the surfaces of my atrial muscles. The idea was to create patterns of scar tissue to block and redirect the errant electrical signals and restore a steady rhuthmos to my heart. The whole thing would take about two or three hours, and I would likely be going home that afternoon.

Moments later, an orderly came and wheeled me through busy hallways to an OR where Dr. d’Avila introduced the technicians and nurses on his OR team. Monitors pinged and machines whirred as moments later an anesthesiologist placed a mask over my mouth and nose, and I slipped into unconsciousness. 

The ablation was a success. Since I woke up, my heart has kept a steady beat, restoring my internal rhuthmos, even if the procedure sadly did not repair the myriad worrisome externalities—the demagogues, carbon footprints, and the rest. Still, the undeniably miraculous singeing of my atrial muscles left me with a realization that if human ingenuity can fix my heart and restore its rhythm, shouldn’t we be able to figure out how to fix other sources of arhuthmos in our lives? 

We already have solutions to some of what ails us. We know how to replace fossil fuels with renewables, make cities less sharp-edged, and create smart gizmos and apps that calm our minds rather than agitating them. 

For my own small fix, I thank Dr. d’Avila and his team, and the inventors of the ablation procedure. I also thank Prometheus, whose hubris in bringing fire to mortals literally saved me by providing the hot-tipped catalyst to repair my ailing heart. Perhaps this can give us hope that the human species will bring the larger rhythms of life into a better, if not perfect, beat. Call me optimistic, but also anxious, about our prospects even as I can now place my finger on my wrist and feel once again the steady rhuthmos of my heart.

What do jumping spiders find sexy? How DIY tech is offering insights into the animal mind.

In his quest to understand the hermit crab housing market, biologist Mark Laidre of Dartmouth College had to get creative. Crabs are always looking to move into a bigger, better shell, but having really nice digs also comes with risks. Sometimes crabs gang up to pull an inhabitant out of an especially desirable shell. If they succeed, the shell is quickly claimed by the largest gang member, leaving another open shell for a slightly smaller crab to grab, and on down the chain until everyone has upgraded. 

To better gauge the trade-offs between shell size and defensibility, Laidre collaborated with an engineer to create the hermit crab eviction machine, a device that holds onto an occupied shell and measures how much force it takes a scientist to pull the crab out (crabs are not harmed or left homeless). It’s essentially a portable load cell that can survive the sun, sand, and humidity of the field. 

The force required to evict a hermit crab is an important measurement, because hanging on to their homes is a matter of life and death for crabs. “If you are evicted, there’s a real strong probability that what is left at the end of one of those chains is something that’s too small for you to even enter,” Laidre says. In his field area on a beach in Costa Rica, a homeless crab can quickly succumb to predators or heat: “You’re really dead meat in a sense.”

Studying the minds of other animals comes with a challenge that human psychologists don’t usually face: Your subjects can’t tell you what they’re thinking. To get answers from animals, scientists need to come up with creative experiments to learn why they behave the way they do. Sometimes this requires designing and building experimental equipment from scratch.

The DIY contraptions that animal behavior scientists create range from ingeniously simple to incredibly complex. All of them are tailored to help answer questions about the lives and minds of specific species, from insects to elephants. Do honeybees need a good night’s sleep? What do jumping spiders find sexy? Do falcons like puzzles? For queries like these, off-the-shelf gear simply won’t do.

The eviction machine was inspired by Laidre’s curiosity about crabs. But sometimes new questions about animals are inspired by an intriguing device or technology, as was the case with another of Laidre’s inventions: the hermit crab escape room (more on that below). The key, Laidre says, is to be sure the question you’re asking is relevant to the animals’ lives.

Here are five more contraptions custom-built by scientists to help them understand the lives and minds of the animals they study. 

OLY DEMPSTER

The falcon innovation box

The brainy birds in the parrot and crow families are the stars of scientific studies on avian intelligence. Now these smarties have a surprising new rival: a falcon. Raptors are not known for creative problem-solving, but behavioral ecologist Katie Harrington of the University of Veterinary Medicine Vienna suspected the striated caracara falcons she had observed on a remote Falkland Island were different. “They’re really interested in investigating things,” she says. “They’re very intelligent birds in general.”

HARRINGTON, ET AL.

To test their smarts, Harrington took inspiration from an “innovation arena” (left), designed for Goffin’s cockatoos, which are members of the parrot family known for their problem-solving abilities. It’s a semicircular array of 20 clear plastic boxes containing puzzles requiring different solutions to release rewards like cashews or corn kernels. Hauling the seven-foot-wide arena to the Falklands was not an option. So Harrington designed a 16-inch-wide “innovation box” attached to a wooden board, with eight compartments and puzzles adapted from the cockatoo studies. 

The birds loved it. “We were having caracaras run full speed to participate,” Harrington says. The challenge was keeping other birds away while one worked the box. The birds were able to solve the puzzles, which involved things like rattling a plank to knock down a bit of mutton or pulling a twig out from under a platform with mutton on it. They were even able to solve a tricky one that required them to punch a hole in a piece of tissue that obscured the treat—a task that eluded some cockatoos. 

In fact, 10 of 15 falcons solved all the puzzles, most of them within two sessions with the box. So Harrington designed eight new, harder tasks, but soon learned that some required unnatural movements for caracaras. She plans to keep trying to find tasks that reveal what they’re physically and mentally capable of. “They’re totally willing to show us,” she says, “as long as we can design things that are good enough to allow them to show us.”

The raccoon smart box

Why are raccoons so good at city living? One theory is that it’s because they’re flexible thinkers. To test this idea, UC Berkeley cognitive ecologist Lauren Stanton adapted a classic laboratory experiment, called the reversal learning task. For this test, an animal is rewarded for learning to consistently choose one of two options, but then the correct answer is reversed so that the other option brings the reward. Flexible thinkers are better at reacting to the reversals. “They’re going to be more able to switch their choices, and over time, they should be faster,” Stanton says.

To test the learning skills of wild urban raccoons in Laramie, Wyoming, Stanton and her team built a set of “smart boxes” to deploy on the outskirts of the city, each with an antenna to identify raccoons that had previously been captured and microchipped. Inside the box, raccoons found two large buttons—sourced from an arcade supplier—that they could push, one of which delivered a reward. Hidden in a separate compartment, an inexpensive Raspberry Pi computer board, powered by a motorcycle battery, recorded which buttons the raccoons pushed and switched the reward button as soon as they made nine out of 10 correct choices. A motor turned a disc with holes in it below a funnel to dispense the reward of dog kibble. 

Many raccoons—and some skunks—were surprisingly eager to participate, which made getting clean data a challenge. “We had multiple raccoons just shove inside the device at the same time, like, three, four animals all trying to compete to get into it,” Stanton says. She also had to employ stronger adhesive to hold the buttons on after a few particularly enthusiastic raccoons ripped them off. (She had placed some kibble inside the transparent buttons to encourage the animals to push them.) 

Surprisingly, the smart boxes revealed that the shyer, more docile raccoons were the best learners. 

The jumping spider eye tracker

The thing about jumping spiders that intrigues behavioral ecologist Elizabeth Jakob is their demeanor. “They look so curious all the time,” she says. Unlike other arachnids, which spend most of their time motionless in their web, jumping spiders are out and about, hunting prey and courting mates. Jakob is interested in what goes on inside their sesame-seed-size brains. What matters to these tiny spiders? 

BARRETT KLEIN

For clues, Jakob watches their eyes, particularly their two principal ones, which have high-acuity color vision at the center of their boomerang-­shaped retinas. She uses a tool evolved from an ophthalmoscope that was specially modified to study the eyes of jumping spiders more than a half-century ago. Generations of scientists, including Jakob and her students at UMass Amherst, have built on this design, slowly morphing it into a mini movie theater that tracks the retinal tubes moving and twisting behind the spiders’ principal eyes as they watch. 

A spider is tethered in front of the tracker while a video of, say, a cricket silhouette is projected through the tracker’s lenses into the spider’s eyes. A beam of infrared light is simultaneously reflected off the spider’s retinas, back through the lenses, and recorded by a camera. The recording of those reflections is then superimposed on the video, showing exactly what the spider was looking at. Jakob found that just about the only thing more interesting to a jumping spider than a potential cricket dinner is a black spot that is growing larger. Could it be an approaching predator? The spider’s lower-resolution secondary eyes catch a glimpse of the looming spot in the corner of the video screen and prompt the primary eyes to shift away from the cricket to get a better look. 

Jakob’s eye tracker has also inspired other scientists’ creative experiments. Visual ecologist Nate Morehouse of the University of Cincinnati used the tracker to reveal that females of one jumping spider species aren’t all that interested in male suitors’ flashy red masks and brilliant green legs—it’s the males’ orange knees that they focus on during courtship displays. “To get this insight into what they actually care about is really cool,” Jakob says.

The hermit crab escape room

Hermit crabs won’t just settle for the best empty snail shell they can find—they also remodel their homes. Hermit crab shells get better with time as each subsequent inhabitant makes home improvements, like widening the entranceway or carving out a more open, spacious interior. 

Dartmouth’s Mark Laidre has been studying crabs and their shell preferences for more than a decade. So when he realized he could use a micro-CT x-ray machine to create a three-­dimensional digital scan of a shell, he immediately began envisioning the experimental possibilities. To better understand the choices crabs make, he scanned shells that crabs clearly favored and then made alterations before 3D-printing them in plastic. “We could add little elements onto those that changed the external or the internal architecture,” Laidre says.

Next, he presented crabs with a dilemma. They were placed alone inside a box with a small exit (as shown below) and given a choice between two shells: a really nice, spacious model but with spikes added to the outside so that the crabs would not fit through the exit, and a shell that they would fit through but with uncomfortable spiny protrusions added to the inside. Could they figure out how to get out? “It’s effectively an escape room,” Laidre says.

When not trapped, crabs preferred the comfy shell with protrusions on the outside, claws down. But hermit crabs are social animals that prefer to be with other crabs, giving them motivation to escape solitary confinement. By the end of the day, more than a third of the trapped crabs had sized up their situation, moved from the crummy shell, and escaped. 

Solving a completely novel problem takes a certain amount of mental wherewithal that crabs don’t often get credit for. And Laidre suspects that cognitive capability may be what separated the successful escapees from the crabs that didn’t make it out of the escape room. 

The bee insominator

Sleepy people tend to be poor communicators. Entomologist Barrett Klein of the University of Wisconsin–La Crosse wanted to know if the same was true for drowsy honeybees. These social insects have a sophisticated communication system, known as the waggle dance, to convey to other bees where to find nectar. Are tired bees worse wagglers? To find out, Klein needed a way to keep bees up all night.

BARRETT KLEIN

He thought of shaking the hive, but this would just send all the bees angrily flying out. He wanted to keep some bees from sleeping while the rest slumbered peacefully, so that their dances could be compared the next day. Klein considered putting individual bees in vials that would be periodically shaken, but he couldn’t be sure if changes in their dance were due to sleepiness or isolation. He also thought of poking bees, aiming streams of air at individual bees, or even shining focused infrared beams at their faces. “Try to do that on all these bees facing all different directions,” Klein said. “It would be insane.” 

Eventually he landed on using neodymium rare earth magnets to jostle bees that had metal wafers glued between their wings with pine resin. “I had to make a hive that was narrow, with only two-millimeter-thick glass on either side, and have the magnets very close but not touching or scraping the glass,” Klein says. The biggest catch with this contraption—dubbed the Insominator—was that Klein had to stay up all night rolling the banks of magnets back and forth alongside the hive three times a minute, depriving himself of sleep along with the bees.

But it paid off: He found that sleepy bees are indeed sloppy dancers. They did shorter dances that were less accurate with direction—a miscommunication that could send hivemates on a flowerless search. In a follow-up study, Klein showed that other bees were not impressed with the drowsy displays and would promptly leave to find better wagglers. 

Happily, he has since upgraded the Insominator to automatically roll the magnets.

Betsy Mason is a freelance science journalist and editor based in the San Francisco Bay Area.