It seems like a lot of folks have a bone to pick with Rep. Joe Manchin [D-WV] who has just this week single-handedly “torpedoed” the Build Back Better bill. The BBB could have been the “the most significant climate legislation in US history,” Megan Mahajan, the manager of energy policy design at the think tank Energy Innovation, told PopSci in October. The plan would put billions of money into developing low-carbon energy technologies and building a national network for electric vehicles.
When this bill dies, so do the chances for the country to reach its lofty and aggressive climate change goals. “There’s still a yawning gap between where we are today and where we need to be to hit President Biden’s climate targets,” Jesse Jenkins, an energy systems engineer at Princeton University who has led an effort to model the effects of the bill on US-wide emissions, told the New York Times. “Without either this bill or a climate bill that’s similar in scope, it’s really hard to see how those goals will be met.”
Unsurprisingly, left-leaning members of the Democratic party and the president himself have voiced frustration with Manchin’s choice. But a more surprising group is speaking out against Manchin’s decision, too—coal miners, including some he represents.
The BBB, along with all of its proposed clean energy benefits, provides a significant boost to coal workers by extending fees paid by coal companies to fund treatments and benefits of workers suffering pneumoconiosis, or Black Lung, which affects thousands of miners across the country. According to the statement, without BBB, that fee will be chopped in half and put the burden of healthcare payments back on individuals and taxpayers. Further, the bill provides tax incentives for companies to build new business on coalfields to employ out-of-work miners.
Additionally, the BBB provides language that would help workers unionize. “This language is critical to any long-term ability to restore the right to organize in America in the face of ramped-up union-busting by employers,” Cecil Roberts, the union’s president, said in a statement. “But now there is no path forward for millions of workers to exercise their rights at work.”
UMWA already released a plan for the energy transition earlier this year stating that “change is coming, whether we seek it or not.” The coal industry saw employment losses of around 50 percent between 2011 and 2020, which will likely continue as the country moves toward a cleaner energy mix. Proposals that include supporting miners and their families by incentivizing alternative jobs in coal country are crucial in protecting these already vulnerable communities.
“We’re likely to lose coal jobs whether or not this bill passes,” Phil Smith, the chief lobbyist for UMWA, told the Washington Post. “If that’s the case, let’s figure out a way to provide as many jobs as possible for those who are going to lose.”
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On Wednesday morning, the FDA issued the first emergency use authorization for a COVID treatment pill. In a phase III trial, Pfizer’s Pavloxvid was 89 percent effective at stopping high-risk COVID patients from becoming severely ill.
The treatment could keep people out of the hospital during the Omicron wave, reducing strain on a crumbling healthcare system. But shortages, both of Paxlovid itself and of COVID tests, could limit its impact during crucial weeks.
Unlike Molnupiravir, Paxlovid works by inhibiting a crucial protein on SARS-CoV-2 particles. One of the ingredients can interact with other drugs, and it isn’t recommended for people with severe kidney or liver problems, but it doesn’t carry the same poorly-understood risks.
Both Paxlovid and Molnupiravir are given as a five-day series of various pills, and must be started within five days of symptom onset. In the phase III trial, which was conducted on people with conditions that put them at high risk for severe COVID, only .8 percent of those who received Paxlovid were hospitalized or died—versus six percent of those who took a placebo. In the Molnupiravir trial, 6.8 percent of the treated patients were hospitalized or died within a 29 day time period compared to 9.7 percent who received a placebo.
Who will get the COVID pill?
For the moment, Paxlovid will only be available by prescription to people over the age of 12 with a high risk of developing severe COVID. Molnupiravir will be available by prescription to adults 18 and older with COVID-19 risk factors. Those qualifying existing conditions are described by the CDC, and include immunocompromising diseases, smoking, and heart disease, among others.
For now, the FDA has not specified whether vaccinated individuals who meet the criteria above will be eligible, which means physicians will likely make their own calls.
How big of a deal is the COVID pill?
When Paxlovid was first developed, it was promising largely because a pill is much easier to deliver than existing COVID treatments, like monoclonal antibodies, which are given intravenously in a hospital. But Omicron has made several of those antibody treatments less effective, leaving providers with an incoming rush of cases and less certainty about how to address them.
Paxlovid and Molnupiravir can be prescribed for use at home, but the catch is that they must be taken within a few days of symptom onset. With hours-long lines for PCR testing in many Omicron hotspots and a shortage of at-home rapid tests, getting diagnosed in time for the treatments to make a difference could prove challenging.
But even if you’re eligible and manage to get a quick diagnosis, you still might not have a course of COVID pills in your future. Pfizer representatives recently told the Washington Post that the company expects to manufacture enough of the drug to treat 180,000 patients by the end of 2021. The Biden administration is expected to buy 3 million courses of Merck’s drug by the end of January.
Last January, the US peaked at about 250,000 new COVID cases per day. US health officials expect Omicron, which appears to be much more transmissible than other variants, to beat that record. Many of those cases will be mild. But with so many unknowns about the risk of long-haul symptoms, the CDC may need to develop firmer guidelines to determine who receives these treatments.
When the US, Europe, and Canada first unveiled the plans for the James Webb Space Telescope in 1997, it sounded like a pitch from an overambitious science student. The contraption would have to schlep a 26-foot-wide mirror across the solar system, while keeping its cool around the radioactive sun. But to build the Next Generation Space Telescope (as it was called at the time), astronomers had to think big. Hubble, the preeminent space telescope, needed a successor—and there were too many open questions about the Big Bang and the expanding universe.
So it’s fair to say, the stakes are higher than imagined. As the world cautiously waits for the telescope to kick off its decade-long mission (the launch date is currently set for Christmas morning), here’s a look back on what it took to prepare it for this moment.
An early concept for the James Webb Space Telescope—known at the time as the Next Generation Space Telescope—was designed by a Goddard Space Flight Center-led team. It already incorporated a segmented mirror, an “open” design, and a large deployable sunshield. In 1996, an 18-member committee led by astronomer Alan Dressler formally recommended that NASA develop a space telescope that would view the heavens in infrared light—the wavelength band that enables astronomers to see through dust and gas clouds and extends humanity’s vision farther out into space and back in time. NASAA full-scale model of the James Webb Space Telescope debuted for the first time in 2013 at the South by Southwest festival in Austin, Texas. Chris Gunn/NASABall Aerospace optical technician Scott Murray inspects the first gold primary mirror segment, a critical element of NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope, prior to cryogenic testing at the Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama. David Higginbotham/NASA/MFSCWhat looks like a giant golden spider weaving a web of cables and cords, is actually ground support equipment, including the Optical Telescope Simulator (OSIM), for the James Webb Space Telescope. OSIM’s job is to generate a beam of light just like the one that the real telescope optics will feed into the actual flight instruments. This photo was taken from inside a large thermal-vacuum chamber called the Space Environment Simulator (SES), at the Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. The golden-colored thermal blankets are made of aluminized Kapton, a polymer film that remains stable over a wide range of temperatures. The structure that looks like a silver and black cube underneath the “spider” is a set of cold panels that surround OSIM’s optics. Chris Gunn/NASAJust like drivers sometimes use snow to clean their car mirrors in winter, two Exelis Inc. engineers are practicing “snow cleaning’” on a test telescope mirror for the James Webb Space Telescope at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center. By shooting carbon dioxide snow at the surface, engineers are able to clean large telescope mirrors without scratching them. This technique was only used if the James Webb Space Telescope’s mirror was contaminated during integration and testing. Chris Gunn/NASANASA engineers inspect a new piece of technology developed for the James Webb Space Telescope, the micro shutter array, with a low light test at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center. Developed at Goddard to allow Webb’s Near Infrared Spectrograph to obtain spectra of more than 100 objects in the universe simultaneously, the micro shutter array uses thousands of tiny shutters to capture spectra from selected objects of interest in space and block out light from all other sources. Laura Baetz/NASA’s Goddard Space Flight CenterNASA engineer Ernie Wright looks on as the first six flight-ready James Webb Space Telescope’s primary mirror segments are prepped to begin final cryogenic testing at the Marshall Space Flight Center. This represents the first six of 18 segments that will form NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope’s primary mirror for space observations. David Higginbotham/NASA/MFSCContamination from organic molecules can harm delicate instruments and engineers are taking special care at NASA to prevent that from affecting the James Webb Space Telescope (and all satellites and instruments). Nithin Abraham, a thermal coatings engineer, places Molecular Adsorber Coating or “MAC” panels in the giant chamber where the Webb telescope was tested. This contamination can occur through a process when a vapor or odor is emitted by a substance. This is called “outgassing.” The “new car smell” is an example of that, and is unhealthy for people and sensitive satellite instruments. Christ Gunn/NASAA bird’s-eye view of NASA Goddard’s cleanroom and the James Webb Space Telescope’s test backplane and mirrors sitting in their packing case. Chris Gunn/NASAThe James Webb Space Telescope emerges from Chamber A at the Johnson Space Center in Houston on December 1, 2017. The telescope’s combined science instruments and optical element exited the massive thermal vacuum testing chamber after about 100 days of cryogenic testing inside it. Scientists and engineers at Johnson put Webb through a series of tests designed to ensure the telescope functioned as expected in an extremely cold, airless environment akin to that of space. Chris Gunn/NASAThe Kapton® polymer-coated membranes of Webb’s sunshield were fully deployed and tensioned in December at Northrop Grumman in Redondo Beach, California. Northrop Grumman designed the observatory’s sunshield for NASA. During testing, engineers sent a series of commands to spacecraft hardware that activated 139 actuators, eight motors, and thousands of other components to unfold and stretch the five membranes of the sunshield into its final taut shape. A challenging part of the test is to unfold the sunshield in Earth’s gravity environment, which causes friction, unlike unfolding material in space without the effects of gravity.For launch the sunshield will be folded up around two sides of the observatory and placed in an Ariane 5 launch vehicle, which is provided by the European Space Agency. Chris Gunn/NASAReaching a major milestone, technicians and engineers successfully connected the two halves of the James Webb Space Telescope for the first time at Northrop Grumman’s facilities in Redondo Beach, California. To combine both halves of Webb, engineers carefully lifted the telescope (which includes the mirrors and science instruments) above the already-combined sunshield and spacecraft using a crane. Team members slowly guided the telescope into place, ensuring that all primary points of contact were perfectly aligned and seated properly. Next the team would have to electrically connect the halves, and then test the electrical connections. Chris Gunn/NASATechnicians and engineers working to ensure the soundness of the James Webb Space Telescope by manually lower its folded sunshield layers for easier access and inspection. After being lowered, engineers thoroughly inspect all five layers of the reflective silver-colored sunshield for any issues that may have occurred as a result of acoustic testing. Acoustic testing exposes the spacecraft to similar forces and stress experienced during liftoff, allowing engineers to better prepare it for the rigors of spaceflight. Chris Gunn/NASAThe arrival of the James Webb Space Telescope to Port de Pariacabo in French Guiana on October 12, 2021. It traveled from California, through the Panama Canal, aboard the MN Colibri. 2021 ESA-CNES-Arianespace/Optique vidéo du CSG – JM GuillonThe Ariane 5 core stage is 5.4 meters in diameter and 30.5 meters high. At launch it will contain 175 tons of liquid oxygen and liquid hydrogen propellants. With its Vulcain 2 engine it provides 140 tons of thrust. It also provides roll control during the main propulsion phase. This rolling maneuver will ensure that all parts of the payload are equally exposed to the sun which will avoid overheating of any elements of the James Webb Space Telescope. Chris Gunn/NASAThe James Webb Space Telescope atop its launch vehicle, before it was encapsulated in the rocket fairing. A protective clean tent was placed around the telescope until launch time. Chris Gunn/NASA
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Life as we know it shouldn’t be able to survive in Venus’s swirling atmosphere of carbon dioxide and sulfuric acid. Its clouds are so acidic, in fact, that they don’t even register on the regular pH scale. But a new study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences suggests that under the right circumstances, certain lifeforms could make a home for themselves by producing ammonia in the planet’s toxic clouds.
The clouds of Venus contain a few tantalizing anomalies—and the unanswered questions for why these anomalies exist leave open the possibility for life on the planet. Researchers have found, for instance, that the concentration of sulfur dioxide dramatically drops higher up in the atmosphere without a known explanation.
To understand why this depletion occurs, Paul Rimmer, a postdoctoral researcher in astrochemistry at the University of Cambridge and co-author of the new study, examined the chemical makeup of the sulfuric acid droplets in the high clouds. There, “instead of being like pure battery acid, it’s a bit more like stomach acid,” Rimmer says. “Still very acidic, but not as acidic.”
Researchers had theorized that acid-neutralizing salts could be swept up into the clouds from the planet’s surface–but the amount of mineral salt needed is too extreme, according to Rimmer’s previous calculations. Now, the research team has proposed a new hypothesis to explain the acidity anomaly: What if the cause wasn’t a mineral from the surface, but a substance produced in the clouds?
The researchers created a model using ammonia, NH3, as the neutralizing agent. Ammonia had been unexpectedly detected in the cloud layers in the 1970s by the Venera 8 and Pioneer Venus probes. This ammonia could be a sign of metabolic activity naturally occurring on Venus—meaning that the atmosphere is home to some form of life, according to Janusz Petkowski, an astrobiology research scientist at MIT and co-author of the paper.
When Rimmer and his colleagues added ammonia into their model of chemical reactions in Venus’s clouds, the ammonia explained the known abundance of water vapor and oxygen in its atmosphere. Chemical pathways involving this compound can also explain previously detected sulfite salts in the cloud droplets.
The harsh conditions in this atmosphere are not unlike extreme environments on Earth, such as the Dallol sulfur pools of Ethiopia, where luminescent yellow pools harbor a few hardy species of bacteria. What’s more, microorganisms on Venus might be shaping their own habitat to be less harsh by producing the ammonia that neutralizes acid. “If life on Venus exists, and if it indeed is responsible for making ammonia, then it makes its own environment in which it lives. It adapted,” says Petkowski.
While ammonia provides a neat solution in this model, this doesn’t necessarily mean that the ammonia is a result of biological processes.
“The responsible thing to do as scientists and astrobiologists interested in this is that we have to cultivate the habit of mind where we assume it’s everything but life first,” says David Grinspoon, a senior scientist at the Planetary Science Institute who was not involved with this research. “There are other things that can happen” in an atmosphere to produce these gases, he says, calling for experts to “rule out everything else” before making claims about life on Venus.
The study authors acknowledge that, while ammonia is a byproduct of life on Earth, the ammonia found on Venus may not be created in the same way. There might be non-biological ways of producing ammonia on other planets that we’re not currently aware of, Rimmer explains.
And even if life on Venus isn’t responsible for ammonia, Grinspoon says, there is still some exotic chemistry at play that is worth trying to discover.
For Rimmer, the key to making further assessments is to have new atmospheric probe data with more advanced technology to make sure that existing data from the 1970s and 1980s did not include anomalous results or false positives.
Interpreting data from the old instruments on the probes is actually quite tricky, Grinspoon adds, posing another problem for making inferences from those initial measurements.
In about a decade, scientists may receive a bounty of data on this cloud chemistry. NASA has scheduled the DAVINCI+ atmospheric probe, planned to launch in 2029, to carry out the first complete compositional study of the entire cross-section of Venus’ atmosphere. Another initiative by private spaceflight company Rocket Lab aims to send a probe to look for biosignatures in Venus’ clouds by 2023.
Meanwhile, Petkowski and the other authors are pushing their colleagues to rethink what it means for a planet to be habitable.
“We should not overextend our understanding of life’s adaptations to absolutely every planetary body everywhere, because our life has never had an environment like the clouds of Venus to even consider adapting to,” says Petkowski. “And so life on Venus, if it exists, is not like life on Earth. It’s life as we don’t know it. The only question is, to what degree it is different?”
This story originally featured on Nexus Media News, a nonprofit climate change news service.
On a sweltering morning in July of 2021, thousands of dead fish washed onto the northeastern shores of Pokegama Lake, 60 miles north of Minneapolis.
Deb Vermeersch, an official with the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources, was called in to investigate.
When she arrived, she saw a quarter-mile stretch of sand covered with the rotting carcass of walleye and Northern pike, which thrive in deep, cool waters, as well as crappies, sunfish and suckers—all warm water dwellers. “They were already pretty decomposed because of the warm water,” Vermeersch recalls.
Because so many different types of fish had died, Vermeersch and her colleagues knew it wasn’t a species-specific parasite, a common cause of fish kills. They zeroed in on the culprit: dangerously low oxygen levels.
Oxygen is disappearing in freshwater lakes at a rate nine times that of oceans due to a combination of pollution and warming waters, according to a study published in Natureearlier this year. Lakes like Pokegama are warming earlier in the spring and staying warm into autumn, fueling algae blooms, which thrive in warm waters, and threaten native fish.
Minnesota, with its 14,380 lakes and temperatures that have risen faster than the national average, is a unique laboratory for studying how climate change is affecting temperate-zone lakes around the world. The state sits at the intersection of four biomes––two distinct prairie ecosystems and two ecologically different forest systems. This means scientists here are able to study how lakes in different ecosystems fare on a warming planet, and look for ways to stave off the worst effects of climate change.
“If you start losing oxygen, you start losing species.“
“What’s going on at the surface is that warmer water holds less oxygen than cool water,” says Lesley Knoll, a University of Minnesota limnologist and one of the authors of the Nature report. She says that longer, hotter summers are interfering with two key processes that have historically kept lakes’ oxygen levels in check: mixing and stratification. In temperate climates, water at the surface of lakes mixes with deep waters in the spring and the fall, when both layers are similar in temperature. As the surface water warms during the summer, the water forms distinct layers based on temperature––cool water at the bottom, warm at the top. This is known as stratification. In the fall, when the surface waters cool again, the water mixes for a second time, replenishing oxygen in deeper waters. But as climate change makes surface water warmer, and keeps it warmer for longer, that mixing doesn’t happen when it should.
“As you have that stronger stratification, the water in the deep part of the lake is cut off from the oxygen at the top part of the lake. If you start losing oxygen, you start losing species,” says Kevin Rose, a biologist at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in New York and a coauthor of the Nature study.
Knoll, Rose and a team of 43 other researchers studied 400 temperate lakes from around the world. They found that, on average, surface waters warmed by 7 degrees Fahrenheit and have lost roughly 5 percent of oxygen since 1980; deep waters, which haven’t warmed much, have still lost an average of almost 20 percent of their oxygen. (Thanks to the state’s long-held lake monitoring programs, almost a quarter the lakes in the study were in Minnesota.)
Warming lakes emit methane
Fish kills aren’t the only reason scientists are concerned about lakes losing oxygen. In extreme cases, when deep waters go completely void of oxygen, something else happens: Methane-emitting bacteria begin to thrive.
“As lakes warm, they will produce more methane and most of that has to do with stratification,” says James Cotner, a limnologist at the University of Minnesota.
Lakes normally emit carbon dioxide as a natural part of breaking down the trees, plants and animals that decay in them, but plants in and around fresh water also absorb it, making healthy lakes carbon sinks.
Lakes have historically emitted methane, too––about 10 to 20 percent of the world’s emissions––but the prospect of them releasing more of the greenhouse gas has Cotner and his colleagues alarmed. Methane is about 25 times more potent than CO2 when it comes to trapping heat in Earth’s atmosphere.
Cotner is leading a team of researchers who are studying what conditions allow methane-emitting bacteria to prosper in lakes and how conservationists can respond.
“The key questions are understanding how much and when carbon dioxide and methane are emitted from lakes, and what are the key variables that can tell how much will be emitted. Certainly, oxygen is a big part of that, but stratification and warming also plays a role,” says Cotner.
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Pollution plays a big role
It’s not just longer, hotter summers that are causing lakes to lose their oxygen. Polluted agricultural runoff (pesticides and fertilizers) and logging have long plagued Minnesota’s lakes. It’s a problem that’s getting worse worldwide as climate change pushes agriculture further away from the equator and into new territory, says Heather Baird, an official with Minnesota’s Department of Natural Resources.
In northern Minnesota, potatoes now grow where pine forests have thrived for years. Phosphorus, a common fertilizer, now runs off from the soil into the region’s lakes, Baird says. Though small amounts of phosphorus occur naturally in lake ecosystems, too much of it feeds harmful algae blooms.
Those blooms, which thrive in warm, nutrient-rich water, set off a chain of events that remove oxygen from deep lake waters.
“When phosphorus builds in lakes and creates algae blooms, those blooms eventually die. As they do, they sink. Deeper down, bacteria break down the algae, using up the remaining oxygen at those lower depths,” said Baird.
A quarter of Minnesota lakes now have phosphorus levels that are so high that the state advises against swimming, fishing or boating in them. Fueled by these nutrients, algae blooms take over, covering the lake in sometimes toxic residue that thrives in warm, nutrient-rich water, as was the case in Pokegama Lake earlier this year. The protists choke out aquatic life, especially fish that thrive in cold, deep waters. This is all exacerbated by warming air temperatures.
The 75 percent rule
Researchers and conservationists in Minnesota are now studying the best ways to protect temperate-climate lakes from the worst effects of climate change. They have found that preserving 75 percent of deep-water lakes’ watersheds appear to keep fish stocks healthy.
“Having a forested watershed helps keep better water quality by filtering out nutrients, which in turn can buffer against the impacts of climate change, to a point,” Knoll said. However, she added, as temperatures continue to rise, “that 75 percent may not be high enough anymore.”
Knoll and state conservationists are focusing their research and efforts on deep, cool lakes that have a better chance of staying oxygenated than warmer, shallower lakes, like Pokegama.
Vermeersch, the Minnesota fisheries supervisor, said it’s unclear what this will mean for the future of lakes like Pokegama. “Hopefully it’s not going to be a linear thing,” she said, adding that fish kills are “probably going to happen more often,” depending on a combination of factors. “When you get lakes like Pokegama that are shallow and already impaired, I think we are going to see more and more conditions like this.”
Correction (December 23, 2021): The story previously identified the wrong Pokegama Lake in Minnesota. The one that experienced the fish kill in July is 60 miles away from Minneapolis, not 140 miles away.
A fossil found in sandstone near the England-Scotland border contains the largest millipede ever found—and the discovery was completely by accident.
In January 2018, Neil Davies, an Earth scientist at the University of Cambridge, had taken a group of PhD students on a “social trip” to Northumberland, England, where he had previously gone on holiday. The group noticed some rocks had crashed onto the beach where they were walking. One of those chunks happened to contain a paleontological surprise.
“The way the boulder had fallen, it had cracked open and perfectly exposed the fossil, which one of our former PhD students happened to spot when walking by,” Davies said in a statement. “It was a complete fluke of a discovery.”
Davies and his colleagues were at first unsure about what they had found. In May 2018, they extracted the fossil and brought it back to Cambridge for analysis. The specimen is just the third known example of an Arthropleura, a genus of giant millipede that roamed the Earth during the Carboniferous Period, between 359 million and 299 million years ago. But that’s not all: This Arthropleura fossil is also the oldest ever found, dating back to 326 million years ago, as well as the largest. It measures a whopping 30 inches by 14 inches.
That suggests a pretty impressive beast. The millipede itself was likely around 8.5 feet long and nearly two feet wide, and probably weighed about 110 pounds. The team’s results were published in the Journal of the Geological Society.
“Finding these giant millipede fossils is rare, because once they died, their bodies tend to disarticulate,” Davies told BBC. This particular specimen is likely just part of a molted exoskeleton, rather than a piece of a millipede’s corpse. Such a sparse fossil record means that these bugs largely remain a mystery. To this day, “we have not yet found a fossilised [millipede] head,” Davies added, “so it’s difficult to know everything about them.”
For example, researchers are unsure how many legs these millipedes had. Current best guesses are either 32 or 64—a paltry set compared to the maximum 1,300 legs recently found on some living millipedes. Scientists also don’t know what these giant bugs ate to sustain their lumbering bodies, though they seem to have thrived due to an abundance of resources and little competition. But later, in the Permian Period, they went extinct—either because of a changing climate or due to new reptile species outcompeting them for food. To uncover the mysteries still lurking in giant millipedes’ history, researchers will need more examples of them to fill out the fossil record.
The area of Northumberland where the fossil was found is mostly sandstone, which “is normally not brilliant for preserving fossils,” Davies told NPR. So “the fact that this has been preserved is, on the one hand, surprising. But it just suggests that actually there might be a lot more and similar things in places where people haven’t really looked for fossils before.”
The fossil will go on public display at Cambridge’s Sedgwick Museum in the New Year.
In 1609 Galileo Galilei pointed a telescope with a lens no wider than a cucumber slice to the heavens to decipher the moon’s cratered surface. Since then, telescopes have become invaluable instruments in our understanding of the vast, unexplored cosmos. Observations of the night sky sparked new theories of the Milky Way and other galaxies near and far, and so came better devices to test them with. We’ve come a long way adding larger mirrors, coatings, more refined optics, and blasting telescopes into space.
“Astronomy is one of the older fields of study, but for the vast majority of the history of science, we’ve been limited to what we can see with our eyes in the night sky,” says Caitlin Casey, an astronomer at the University of Texas. “The development of the telescope in the 1600s was really transformative, and it allowed us to peer deeper and deeper into the cosmos. That just led to one mystery after another; there are some answers, but more questions.”
More than four centuries after Galileo peered into the cucumber-thin lens, NASA is scheduled to launch the largest, most powerful, and most hotly anticipated telescope ever put into space. For three decades, the public has gotten used to seeing space through the Earth-orbiting Hubble Space Telescope. Billed as Hubble’s scientific successor, James Webb (which has some controversy behind its naming) will be able to track down light from the universe’s infancy, which we know precious little about.
“It’s by far the most complex science mission that we’ve done,” says Lee Feinberg, Webb optical telescope element manager at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, who has worked on the observatory’s optics for the past two decades.
Fourteen years behind schedule and 20 times over budget, Webb has faced a lot of bumps on its way to the spaceport in Kourou, French Guiana. (The team pushed back the launch date to December 24 last week due to a faulty data cable.) But after more than a thousand scientists, technicians, and engineers from 14 countries overcame the challenges that emerged in its development, the telescope is finally ready to zoom away in search of “first light,” bringing astronomers closer to the Big Bang than ever before.
An early blueprint of the James Webb Space Telescope. NASA
A giant mirror built for time travel
Milestones in optics and imaging technology have enabled astronomers to observe a great deal of the universe’s history. But when it comes to understanding how it began, details are still murky.
So far, telescopes haven’t allowed us to peer back far enough to see the universe’s first light, which shimmered off the earliest stars that burst into life. Webb, however, is decked out with the latest technology specifically designed to collect and focus on that faint glow.
Size is part of the solution. The orbiting observatory will use a colossal mirror forged from featherweight beryllium—chosen because it holds its shape at extremely cold temperatures. The metal and glass is assembled into a honeycomb shape that spans more then 21 feet across; the 18 hexagonal mirror segments can unfold and are very efficient at collecting light. “Even by ground-based telescope standards, it’s a good-sized telescope,” says Marcia Rieke of the University of Arizona’s Steward Observatory, who has been on the working group for the Webb project since the late 1990s.
Project scientist Mark Clampin is reflected in the honeycomb mirrors as they’re assembled at the Marshall Space Flight Center. Ball Aerospace
Like the Hubble Space Telescope, which has been orbiting Earth for 31 years now, Webb is a Cassegrain reflector-type telescope; it uses a primary mirror to collect light and focus it on a secondary mirror, re-reflecting the energy on its four state-of-the-art instruments, including three ultra-sensitive cameras, to create an image. The larger the mirror’s area, the more light it can collect to document faint objects at greater resolution—think of it like increasing your camera’s aperture, Rieke explains. When astronomers get data back from Webb’s Earth-facing antenna starting in the summer of 2022, they’ll be better images than those taken by Hubble and other existing telescopes in outer space.
The James Webb Space Telescope picks up infrared light that is just outside of the part of the spectrum that’s visible to human eyes. There’s a good reason for this: Due to the expansion of the universe, light from distant objects shifts to longer wavelengths at the redder end of the spectrum. What’s more, newly formed stars and planets are hidden behind dust that soaks up visible light. Webb’s infrared gaze will be able to pierce through that dust, revealing what’s behind.
Three of Webb’s four detecting instruments (an imaging camera and two different Near Infrared Spectrographs) cover the whole infrared wavelength range—from 0.6 to 28.8 microns. Rieke helped design the telescope’s Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam for short) and will be its principal investigator upon its launch. With it, Webb will be able to take clearer images from unexplored corners across the universe, capturing the light from galaxies that are even older than the Milky Way.
The heart of Near-Infrared Camera consists of a 16-megapixel mosaic of light sensors with four separate chips mounted together. K. W. Don/University of Arizona
Webb’s mirrors are also lined with a microscopic layer of gold that reflects infrared light better than nearly any other metal. That puts them at around 98-percent reflective (compared to the typical 85-percent reflectiveness of standard mirrors), which means they can capture almost all incoming photons. “We picked gold for very technical reasons, but it [also] happens to be that it looks very interesting,” Feinberg says.
Essentially, Webb is a heat-detecting telescope, Rieke adds. But to do its job and capture the faintest hints of galaxies, some parts of the telescope need to be exceptionally cold or else all it would see is its own radiation. Webb has a tennis-court-sized sunshield—a five-layer, diamond-shaped structure made of a material called Kapton—that insulates it from solar rays and allows it to cool down to -390 degrees Fahrenheit. At that degree of frigidness, the telescope gives off so little radiation that it no longer interferes with its infrared cameras and sensors.
Though it’s often referred to as Hubble’s successor, Rieke says that Webb is really a bigger and more sensitive sibling to the Spitzer Space Telescope, which also had infrared capabilities. It had to be retired in January 2020 because it flew too far away to send back images to Earth. And they’re both successors to the Infrared Astronomical Satellite, which in 1983, was the first infrared telescope to be sent into space.
Hubble varies in that it mostly captures the same kind of light that humans can see and is only sensitive to a small portion of the infrared spectrum, “Hubble has worked tirelessly to find more and more distant galaxies,” Casey, principal investigator for Webb, says. “But it’s just really limited because it can’t push to longer wavelengths.” And when it does produce images in infrared, they’re often tainted by its own radiation.
The Sunshield test unit at a cleanroom in Redondo Beach, California. The Kapton material provides an effective SPF of 1,000,000 (suntan lotion generally has an SPF of 8 to 50). In addition to providing a cold environment, the Sunshield provides thermal stability that’s essential to maintaining proper alignment of the primary mirror segments as the telescope changes its orientation to the sun. Chris Gunn/NASA
Webb will be a busy bee once it gets its permanent home almost a million miles out into space.
More than a thousand teams of astronomers from across the globe applied for telescope time during Webb’s first year, but a project by Casey—along with Jeyhan Kartaltepe of the Rochester Institute of Technology—was among the 286 proposals approved for Webb’s first year of observations. Though most groups were given around six observing hours, Casey and Kartaltepe’s research team (consisting of about 50 people spread over the world) was granted 218 hours to conduct the COSMOS-Webb survey, which aims to gather images of half a million young galaxies created soon after the Big Bang. While some surveys look at a portion of sky the size of a pinpoint held at arm’s length, Casey says they’ll be seeing a patch of sky the size of three full moons on an average night.
The telescope’s primary mirror illuminated in the dark. NASA Goddard Space Flight Center
According to Kartaltepe, they’ll look for bubbles showing where the first pockets of the early universe were reionized—meaning when light from the first stars and galaxies ripped apart hydrogen atoms that ultimately filled up the cosmos. “We call that ‘first light,’ the first stars that were able to emit photons and that were then able to send [those energy particles] to travel through the universe to where we can see them,” Kartaltepe says, adding that the Webb telescope was originally dubbed the “First Light Machine.” Webb will also help map the earliest substances in the universe, including the still-mysterious and elusive dark matter.
Casey and Kartaltepe’s team will ultimately develop a deep field of view by observing nearby patches of sky repeatedly and stitching together broader views of the early cosmic history. Ultimately, they’ll probe star, galaxy, and dark matter distribution and the origins of our universe. The COSMOS-Webb team will also make their data publicly available for other researchers.
Because Webb works in the infrared, it will also probe the atmospheres of planets around other stars for molecules like water, methane, and carbon dioxide. The telescope’s Near Infrared Spectrograph can break up light from 100 galaxies at a time into individual wavelengths by using tiny shutters—each about the width of human hair—that only let in the photons from their target and block everything else. The instrument separate light its full spectrum like a prism, which allows researchers to sift through the environments of faraway worlds and understand their potential habitability.
Next stop, space
Now comes one of the more precarious phases in the telescope’s development: the launch from the spaceport in Kourou, French Guiana.
The James Webb Space Telescope’s NIRCam instrument is readied for shipment. Lockheed Martin
Because the James Webb Space Telescope is so large, the segments had to be folded up like origami to fit inside the 171-by-18 feet Ariane 5 rocket. Unlike Hubble, the Webb telescope won’t sit in low in orbit; once launched into space, it will take about 30 days to travel to its new perch at the depths of the universe before unfurling in a complicated dance to align its mirrors on faraway galaxies. A camera onboard will snap different sequences as the mirrors get into position, so that a team back on Earth can make adjustments in the billionths of a meter. “We need to get it to within a fraction of a wavelength of light in accuracy [in sensors],” Feinberg says, “We’ve been waiting quite a long time to actually do this.” The alignment process will take about six months, after which Webb will begin collecting data.
After its arrival at the spaceport, Webb was carefully lifted from its packing container at an angle. This is the same configuration the telescope will be in when it is inside its launch vehicle, the Ariane 5 rocket. Chris Gunn/NASA
Webb’s best images will start to appear in mid-2022, but the clock is ticking for the telescope’s highly anticipated voyage. The mission is designed with a five- to 10-year lifetime, and its remote location means that unlike Hubble, it can’t be repaired if anything goes wrong. So, it needs to work flawlessly right out of the box. After that decade of gazing far into the stars, Webb will run out of fuel and essentially become a multi-billion dollar piece of space junk—but not before it changes how we see our place in the universe forever.
“Webb started when I was in grade school,” Casey says. “It’s really phenomenal that as a species that is bound ultimately to the planet that is home, we’re able to peer so far into the cosmos as to see its own beginnings. That’s pretty profound.”
Noah Wardrip-Fruin is a professor of computational media at the University of California, Santa Cruz. This story was originally featured on The Conversation.
Before Pong there was Computer Space, the first commercial video game. The progenitor of today’s US$175 billion industry debuted on Oct. 15, 1971, at the Music Operators of America trade show in Chicago. Housed in a futuristic-looking cabinet, Computer Space took its place alongside the latest jukeboxes, pinball machines and other coin-operated games manufacturers were pitching to arcade and bar owners.
Computer Space, made by the small company Nutting Associates, seemed to have everything going for it. Its scenario – flying a rocket ship through space locked in a dogfight with two flying saucers – seemed perfect for the times. The Apollo Moon missions were in full swing. The game was a good match for people who enjoyed science-fiction movies like “2001: A Space Odyssey” and “Planet of the Apes” and television shows like “Star Trek” and “Lost in Space,” or those who had thrilled to the aerial combat of the movies “The Battle of Britain” and “Tora! Tora! Tora!” There was even prominent placement of a Computer Space cabinet in Charlton Heston’s film “The Omega Man.”
But when Computer Space was unveiled, it didn’t generate a flood of orders, and no flood ever arrived. It wasn’t until Computer Space’s makers left the company, founded Atari and released Pong the next year that the commercial potential of video games became apparent. The company sold 8,000 Pong units by 1974.
Nolan Bushnell, who led the development of both Computer Space and Pong, has recounted Computer Space’s inauspicious start many times. He claimed that Computer Space failed to take off because it overestimated the public. Bushnell is widely quoted as saying the game was too complicated for typical bar-goers, and that no one would want to read instructions to play a video game.
Computer Space was an attempt to commercialize the first popular video game. In February 1962, a group of MIT engineers created Spacewar!, a game that was free to play for those lucky enough to have access to the few bulky, expensive computers of the day.
The initial design was two ships against a star-field background, shooting at each other. It was a technical marvel, but unrewarding to play until the addition in April of gravity and a large star in the middle of the play area.
At about the same time Computer Space debuted, Stanford University students were waiting in line for hours in the student union to play another version of Spacewar!, The Galaxy Game, which was a hit as a one-off coin-operated installation just down the street from where Bushnell and his collaborators worked.
So was the difference in success between The Galaxy Game and Computer Space a matter of college students versus the average Joe? Was a reproduction of Spacewar!, an engaging game with a theme perfect for the era, really too complex for a public that filled out tax forms without software and found library books using paper index cards?
In researching my most recent book, “How Pac-Man Eats,” I became convinced that it wasn’t. That, instead, the common story of the genesis of the commercial game industry is wrong.
Key evidence that complexity was not the issue comes in the form of Space Wars, another take on Spacewar! that was a successful arcade video game released in 1977.
Lacking gravity
Why were The Galaxy Game and Space Wars successful at finding an enthusiastic audience while Computer Space was not? The answer is that Computer Space lacked a critical ingredient that the other two possessed: gravity.
The star in Spacewar! produced a gravity well that gave shape to the field of play by pulling the ships toward the star with intensity that varied by distance. This made it possible for players to use strategy – for example, allowing players to whip their ships around the star.
Why didn’t Computer Space have gravity? Because the first commercial video games were made using television technology rather than general-purpose computers. This technology couldn’t do the gravity calculations. The Galaxy Game was able to include gravity because it was based on a general-purpose computer, but this made it too expensive to put into production as an arcade game. The makers of Space Wars eventually got around this problem by adding a custom computer processor to its cabinets.
Without gravity, Computer Space was using a design that the creators of Spacewar! already knew didn’t work. Bushnell’s story of the game play being too complicated for the public is still the one most often repeated, but as former Atari employee Jerry Jessop told The New York Times about Computer Space, “The game play was horrible.”
This story originally appeared in the Calm issue of Popular Science. Current subscribers can access the whole digital edition here, or click here to subscribe.
The first time I get high on Ketamine, I’m not sure I’m doing it right. The setting is nice enough: I’m tucked beneath a gray weighted blanket, reclining on a creamy leather chair. Headphones deliver the sort of playlist you’d find by searching for “meditation” on Spotify, and a mural of a gorgeous forest is the last thing I see before putting on a silky sleep mask. A therapist sits a few feet away, ready to provide reassurance if I need it. Down the hall, a friendly nurse practitioner is on call with Tylenol and gluten-free pretzels if I feel a little peaky when the session finishes, plus anti-anxiety medication if the sensation crosses into a little more than peaky. I am warm, safe, and supported.
Am I high enough, though? Should someone be saying something? Has it started? Am I ruining things by expecting something to “start”?
I came to Field Trip, a psychedelic clinic in midtown Manhattan, to try to vanquish post-traumatic stress disorder resulting from an abusive relationship that ended years ago. Ketamine’s on-label use is for surgical anesthesia, but over the past two decades, neuroscientists and psychiatrists have found it remarkably effective in treating symptoms of depression. Subsequent studies have also shown its promise with other mental health problems such as anxiety, substance abuse disorders, and PTSD.
In operating rooms, anesthesiologists characterize the drug as dissociative—distorting perception of sight and sound to the point of temporary oblivion—yet when it’s shot into my arm for the first time I remain decidedly associated. I feel woozy and relaxed, and the vague patterns of light and color I’m used to seeing when I squeeze my eyes closed are more vivid than usual. Still, all I can think about is that I’m supposed to be viewing my trauma with a new lens: seeing what I did and what was done to me from some great protective height. Turning inward will, I hope, empower me to banish whatever monsters I might find there. But right now, all my inner self has to say is, I am probably doing ketamine wrong.
After about an hour spent debating whether I should speak my misgivings out loud, my therapist gently invites me to “return to the space.” Over a cup of turmeric tea, I sheepishly admit that I fear I wasted my first of six prescribed “experiences.”
They assure me that this is common among their clientele so far. Field Trip opened its first clinic, in Toronto, in March 2020, to treat depression and other mental health problems, and has operated in New York City only since the following July. With my sessions straddling the turn of 2021, I’m working through a protocol the team there is still studying and adjusting.
To the average person, what Field Trip is doing may seem like a fringe practice, but it isn’t, strictly speaking, all that new. Research on how psychedelic experiences may relieve mental health conditions dates to the middle of the 20th century and stems from spiritual and cultural practices centuries older than that. Ketamine’s ability to cure patients let down by traditional antidepressants and therapy emerged in the late ’90s, and since then, investigators have worked steadily to hone their understanding. It’s helped a lot that the drug, approved as a general anesthetic in 1970, is easy to get—unlike more heavily regulated compounds like LSD or psilocybin. That availability, though, has also made it possible for commercial use to outpace scientific consensus. Online directories indicate that at least 75 US clinics offer the substance to the public.
While evidence for ketamine’s antidepressant effects is strong, questions remain about exactly how it should be administered, to whom, and how often. And only in the past few years have researchers begun to test it in Field Trip–like regimens—taken in trip-inducing portions in conjunction with talk therapy. If the outcomes are positive, that would align with similar findings for other psychedelic substances.
In my own search for healing, I have tried antidepressants, anti-anxiety meds, and cognitive behavioral therapy. The existing data told me that ketamine might help and, even if it didn’t, was unlikely to do any harm if my practitioners are careful and trustworthy. I decided to take the risk.
In 2006, when I was 14, an episode of House M.D. gave me a glimpse into ketamine’s potential. It’s good TV: After a gunshot wound, the medical drama’s titular drug addict and diagnostic supersleuth emerges from surgery to a confusing series of hallucinations and stretches of lost time. He blames his colleagues for dosing him with ketamine as an anesthetic. They counter there’s research suggesting that a single infusion could alleviate his chronic leg pain. Plot twist! It’s all been a dream, and he’s still bleeding out from his bullet wound. As he’s rolled into the ER, House gasps, “Give me ketamine.”
Later episodes portray a man reborn without pain or strife, albeit temporarily. I remember being amused at the suggestion that just one IV drip might rewire your brain for the better. But when writers scripted the show, real-world research on ketamine had implications beyond easing nerve pain. That same year, scientists at the National Institutes of Mental Health released the results of a trial in which 17 patients with depression received IVs of ketamine while 14 with a similar profile got saline drips. Nearly 75 percent of those receiving the drug showed marked improvement in their depression symptoms the day after; more than a third of them still felt the effects a week later. A quick infusion seemed to accomplish what years of therapy and traditional medication had not.
Meanwhile, the notion that tripping can be a lasting cure for mental illness has been around since the 1950s. Early tests combining LSD, mescaline, or psilocybin with talk therapy delivered promising results. But the Nixonian war on drugs made the substances illegal in 1970, stymying progress for those psychedelics and eventually MDMA as well. Decades of lobbying from academics and the nonprofit research group Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS) eventually led the Food and Drug Administration to recommend in the early 1990s that studying MDMA could continue under strict oversight.
That, coincidentally, is about the same time ketamine came into the conversation, as neuroscientists began to suspect it might affect depression. While all mental illnesses have complex causes, we know that the balance of certain chemicals called neurotransmitters—which facilitate communication between nerve cells—plays a part in regulating symptoms of depression. Common medications such as Prozac and Lexapro primarily act by boosting happy-making serotonin to spur the brain to increase its interconnectivity over the course of weeks or months. Though the exact mechanism by which these drugs work is still rather murky, eventually, researchers at Yale became intrigued by the potential role of another, more abundant brain chemical: glutamate.
If drugs that target serotonin help, they posit, then compounds that zero in on glutamate might help even more. They theorize that depressive symptoms arise when receptors in the brain that handle glutamate—what Gerard Sanacora, director of the Yale Depression Research Program, describes as the “gasoline” of the brain—aren’t being stimulated and can’t do their thing. That causes some synapses, the junctions between neurons, to wither. Ketamine reactivates those glutamate receptors, which may then create a sudden boom of new brain cell connections as the system goes back to normal. They suspect that this superbloom of neural networks represents a quicker, more reliable version of the same process by which more mainstream antidepressant meds work.
It seems far-fetched that something as complex as trauma, which can come from any number of sources, could disappear with a single shot.
While the precise mechanism at play remains unknown, when ketamine is effective, it can be like flipping a switch. “In psychiatry, we just generally don’t have treatments that work quickly,” says David Feifel, who was a professor of psychiatry at UC San Diego when he read the 2006 NIMH ketamine study. “I thought, If this is even half as good as it appears to be, it’s going to be a blockbuster.” Consider the potential impact: More than 264 million people on Earth are affected by depression, according to the World Health Organization, which makes it a leading cause of disability and a major contributor to suicide, which kills nearly 800,000 people globally each year. Knowing the stakes, Feifel set out to look into ketamine for himself.
With the drug readily available as an anesthetic, he opened an outpatient program at UCSD in 2008 and began collecting data, though he recalls that some of his colleagues acted as if he were the one in need of psychiatric help for starting the practice. “It was very controversial,” he says, but the effort maintained the university’s approval by treating only the most desperate. “We started with the patients who had tried everything and failed and were suicidal if we didn’t do anything,” Feifel says.
In 2014, psychiatrists and neuroscientists at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai published the first randomized trial on ketamine for chronic PTSD in JAMA Psychiatry. They had found a marked reduction in symptoms in their 41 subjects after a single dose. Three years later, Feifel published his own findings in the Journal of Affective Disorders—the first report on how ketamine patients fared outside the controlled setting of a clinical trial, and one that confirmed the drug’s efficacy in treating depression. Since then, a handful of other small studies have supported Mount Sinai’s results, and some suggest that repeat dosing may help sustain improvements in mental health over time.
Convinced that academia was moving too slowly, Feifel opened a private clinic offering ketamine and other therapies in La Jolla, California, in 2017. While he agrees that more work is needed to fully harness the drug’s potential for depression and other conditions, he has no qualms about carefully monitored use in private facilities. “There’s too much suffering out there,” Feifel says. “We’ve got to help people, because their lives are ticking away.”
Field trip’s practitioners ease me into higher doses with each visit, and it’s around the halfway point in my regimen that I go from feeling slightly not-lucid to knowing what it means to be high on ketamine. My “journeys” are at first unfamiliar but easily described: a feeling of deep contentment, of being held close, with rapid-fire thoughts that seem somehow more profound than they would otherwise, and perhaps a slight sense of disconnection from my body. By the fourth session, the experiences become almost impossible to articulate.
Under the influence of 85, 90, 100 milligrams of ketamine (Field Trip set my max dose at around 1 milligram per kilogram of body weight), my perception of time and sound warp in irreproducible ways. I see colorful patterns. Not swirly like clichéd lava lamps and black-light posters, but tessellated or jagged like pyrite. The shapes collapse in on themselves and cycle in time with the music from my headphones, which also collapses in on itself and becomes quite atonal. I frequently feel as if I’m sinking into heaps of soft grass. The world and everything in it is made of shades of green.
Somewhere in this emerald whirlpool that looks like pixelated glass but feels like a cloud, I hope to find and slay my demons.
Living with PTSD has been like living in a haunted house. It’s not inherently untenable. I’ve met ghosts capable of tormenting me for a few hours or days, but most are benign. Still, I never know when a bubble bath will remind me of the nights I spent floating in my ex’s tub feeling as if I might as well die. I lose time and expend a lot of emotional energy occasionally ruminating on my past self’s inability to leave an abusive relationship. Sometimes it feels as if jump-scare-loving ghouls have settled into my sock drawer and under my desk, and I have no way of knowing when they’ll choose to pop out.
Then there’s the existential threat. To live with PTSD, for me, is to know that there is always the possibility that I will be scared to death. That a memory will emerge that I cannot recover from. That I will become mired in helplessness and despair in a way that nothing—not the happy marriage and comfortable home of my current life nor the years of therapy I’ve absorbed—will be able to counteract.
Unfortunately for me and upward of 8 percent of the US population, PTSD is even less understood than major depressive disorder, though the two often tend to darken the same halls. Early research like the 2014 Mount Sinai study suggests that the same kind of miraculous plug-and-play IV therapy that makes ketamine a game changer for depression might help PTSD patients, but the effects on both can be temporary. As difficult as it was for psychiatrists 20 years ago to believe that ketamine might turn depression around in a day, it seems even more far-fetched that something as complex as trauma, which can come from any number of sources and manifest in infinite ways—from violent flashbacks to emotional detachment—could disappear with only a single shot.
But the practitioners at Field Trip don’t promise quick fixes. My treatment protocol, informed by the work laid out by the MAPS research group and similar organizations, is far from a fast infusion in a doctor’s office. It begins with a psychiatrist’s evaluation and an hour-long initial session with the licensed therapist who will guide me through the process, which consists of two ketamine experiences a week for three weeks. Before each, I meet with my therapist to set intentions. I talk about my history of eating disorders and my recurring memories of abuse, and how I would like to find some kind of healing. A nurse practitioner takes my vitals as I settle in. Then it’s into the dark, curated streaming playlist void, and I feel the dull punch of the drug being shot into my tricep.
I’m aimless and out of it for about an hour at most. Though I occasionally zero in on some profound realization under the swirling green, it’s in the integration phase—the 20 or so minutes I spend talking with my therapist as I wake up and the hour I spend talking to her over video chat the following day—that the real magic is happening. Feeling soft and open (“expansive” is the word I often write in my journal), I experience a mental quiet I have never known before. I’m able to have one single thought at a time. I luxuriate over each notion like it’s a piece of chocolate melting in my mouth. I am achingly kind to myself in these moments, and I ache to be so kind to myself at all times.
This course of treatment—a high-intensity trip bookended by shrink sessions—is known as psychedelic-assisted therapy. The evidence has piled up that this approach works with other drugs, but no one’s stringently tested it yet with ketamine. A 2020 overview, authored by several experts in association with the American Psychiatric Association Council of Research, concluded that, based on existing clinical trials, MDMA seems to be effective against PTSD when combined with tailored therapy. The same is true for psilocybin as a remedy for depression and cancer-related anxiety. Results are more scant, but promising, for LSD.
Although ketamine has the most data backing its use in addressing depression out of the whole bunch, it’s gotten the least academic attention in terms of developing treatments that combine it with therapy. “The issue with ketamine now is that it’s already out there,” Feifel says. “It’s approved for anyone to use in any way, which makes it hard to set standards.” Any physician with a controlled-substance license can administer the stuff. That means clinics can make up their own ways of using it—ranging from IVs of the drug administered by anesthesiologists to lower repeated doses. There’s even an FDA-approved ketamine variant, Spravato, which shows great promise in fighting treatment-resistant depression and isn’t intended to induce psychedelic experiences at all. The question for places like Field Trip, Feifel says, is how to determine if therapy provides an added benefit and whether psychedelic experiences are a crucial part of the process. Those answers require more research.
When the FDA clears other psychedelics specifically for treating depression and PTSD, Feifel expects to see more standardization in how they’re used. Advocacy groups like MAPS envision a future where people struggling with their mental health can work with practitioners to decide which mind-altering compound might assist them and how they should combine the experience with therapy to best achieve long-term healing.
Because of the lack of existing data on ketamine for psychedelic-assisted therapy, there’s no clear endpoint at which I’ll be able to say it’s “worked” for me and that the benefits won’t slip away in time. More than three months after my last treatment, I still feel improved, though perhaps not as radically as I did a few weeks ago. I will keep going to talk therapy. I will keep meditating. If I start having more “bad” days than “good” ones, my therapist might recommend a “booster” appointment a couple of times a year or as often as every six weeks. Maybe I’ll try other drugs too.
In the course of my reporting for this article, more than one researcher told me they would just love to see how I’d do on MDMA, which, if current trials stay on track, could get the FDA greenlight as soon as 2023. Field Trip, for its part, is working on developing more long-term solutions that don’t necessarily require more drugs; the company plans to create group counseling options for people who’ve been through the experience. Regardless, I do feel the ketamine sessions helped me. With nothing to compare them to and a sample size of just one Rachel, I can’t draw any broader conclusions.
For me—despite the fact that science can’t yet explain precisely why—having taken ketamine helps me see that I’m not trapped in a haunted house. I am the haunted house.
It’s like this. Somewhere in the midst of my fourth treatment, when I’ve decided to focus on seeking respect for myself and my body, my abuser finally appears. My dose is high enough at this point that thinking of anything, including my own name, leads me to lazily roll the word around in my brain as an abstract concept: What is a “Rachel,” really?
At last, the pathological narcissist who coercively controlled me all those years ago floats through my hazy green space. I immediately grasp that he is physically a part of me. By that I don’t mean I’m mulling over the great oneness of all living things. When I emerge from the trip and enter the integration phase of my treatment, what I write in my journal is not that we are universally connected. I write that the memories and horrors and ruminations that make up my PTSD are not my ex. They are me. I do not have to fight and struggle to excise them, but rather to love and cherish and heal them.
On my way home from my final session, I think I see the man who abused me. My Lyft idles at an intersection where I might once have expected to run into him, and someone in the crosswalk lights up my brain like a parade. His face is turned away, but his clothes, his swagger, the flip of his hair. Could it be? No, as it turns out. The hands are all wrong.
As we coincidentally follow this stranger from stoplight to stoplight, crawling in rush-hour traffic, I ask myself what this soft, enlightened, expansive Rachel would do if it were the man who’d pitted and scarred me inside and out. Would I simply close my eyes and wish him well? Would I lower the window and shout forgiveness?
No, I decide. I would still tell him he could go rot in hell. My sense of connection and empathy didn’t change how I would confront a bad man standing right in front of me. Nor did it quiet the protective instincts that had long left me on edge whenever I passed through his old stomping grounds. But I do feel better able to put the ghosts in my head to bed. I settle back into the folds of my rideshare’s leather seat and close my eyes the rest of the way home.
This story originally appeared in the Calm issue of Popular Science. Current subscribers can access the whole digital edition here, or click here to subscribe.
Anastasia Snelling is the department chair of Health Studies at American University. Rebecca Hagedorn is an assistant professor in Food and Nutrition at Meredith College. This story originally featured inThe Conversation.
It’s harder to learn when you are suffering from hunger or searching for your next meal.
But while around 30 million K-12 students in public schools are eligible for free or reduced lunch, it is a different matter when they leave. Many of those who graduate from high school and enroll in higher education institutions find they no longer have access to federal food programs.
The nation’s leading anti-hunger program for adults, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, provides food assistance to almost 44 million Americans. Only an estimated 18 percent of college students have been eligible for the program in recent years, with a low 3 percent actually receiving food assistance.
This may be changing. Congress recently passed legislation that included relief for the estimated one in three students who struggle with food insecurity. Under the Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2021, college students who are enrolled at least half-time, many of whom were previously ineligible due to historical guidelines, may now be able to access SNAP.
To us as scholars who study food insecurityon campus, this is welcome news—our research suggests opening up SNAP would help students. But there are concerns that the current expansion may last only a few months and that any lasting change may suffer from a lack of awareness among students over their eligibility.
Temporary relief
One look at the Food and Nutrition Service web page on student SNAP enrollment suggests the change to allow students to receive benefits may be short-lived. The word “temporary” is printed in bold over the updated guidelines for student eligibility. It is also noted that student exemptions may be in effect only until 30 days after the COVID-19 public health emergency has ended.
So while the measure will give immediate relief to an estimated 3 million college students newly eligible for SNAP benefits, there is no guarantee that this will be permanent. Other proposed legislation to address college food insecurity on a more lasting basis, including 12 bills introduced in the last legislative session alone, include a more permanent expansion of SNAP eligibility. But to date, none has been enacted.
While progress has been slow on a federal level, individual states have had more success. To date, 13 states have introduced college food insecurity-related bills, with seven of those states enacting policies.
California’s hunger-free campuses bill, enacted in 2017, awards funding to campuses that meet the “hunger-free” designation, which requires colleges to employ an individual to help students apply for SNAP and other food resources; have a food pantry or food distribution on campus; and implement a meal-share program that allows students to donate unused meal plan swipes to other students in need.
And in 2019, both Hawaii and Illinois amended SNAP eligibility to include students in career and technical programs.
These programs could, we believe, serve as models for states that have yet to move forward with college food insecurity policies.
Raising awareness
But even with the—at least temporary—federal expansion of the SNAP program to campuses, there is a second problem: Among students, there appears to be low awareness of the program.
A 2018 report by the Government Accountability Office estimated that of the 3 million college students who were eligible for SNAP benefits under the old rules, only 43 percent were enrolled in the program.
As such, any permanent expansion of SNAP benefits to students would benefit from a campus outreach program to better inform students of what they are entitled to.
Interviews we conducted with 23 college students in North Carolina and West Virginia for a yet to be published paper indicate that understanding of federal nutrition assistance programs may be limited. Most students interviewed said they “don’t know much” about SNAP, while others stated they haven’t heard of it at all.
For students who were familiar with SNAP, responses on the benefits of the program and eligibility for the program varied widely, indicating a need for campus-based education.
Some campuses have sought to hold SNAP awareness events to engage the campus community in understanding SNAP and help eligible students enroll for benefits. Events like these may prove increasingly vital during this period of expanded eligibility to ensure students in need of food assistance can navigate the often complicated enrollment process.
Some of the college students we spoke to were conscious of the prejudices against people on federal assistance programs. “TV shows make these [federal] programs seem like a bad thing,” one student told us. Another spoke of “feeling self-conscious if I had to use [SNAP benefits] because of what other people’s reactions would be.”
It has led to hesitancy among some to come forward for federal benefits. As one student shared, “I would rather use community-based resources [such as food pantries, soup kitchens] because there is a more positive connotation.”
Institutions of higher education have an important role to play in addressing food insecurity for students. And nonprofits have partnered with institutions to tackle the problem. The College and University Food Bank Alliance, for example, has a network of over 700 campus food pantries.
But permanently expanding a federal SNAP program to students and making them aware of their eligibility has the potential to be transformative for those struggling to learn while not knowing where their next meal is coming from.
In 1946, the National School Lunch Program was launched recognizing that children must be nourished to learn. Seventy-five years later, we believe the U.S. must address food insecurity among college students to ensure educational achievement for all.
