Popular Science

Fall 2023
POPSCI.COM 18
FA L L 2023 Vol. 295, No. 3
Editor-in-Chief Annie Colbert

Senior Deputy Editor Purbita Saha
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News Editor Sara Kiley Watson
COVER IMAGE BY Assistant Editor Charlotte Hu

ANDREW B. MYERS News Writers Laura Baisas, Andrew Paul
VISUAL EFFECTS BY
ZAIN BIN AWAIS Copy Editor S.B. Kleinman
BACKGROUND IMAGES:
GETTY IMAGES Researchers Ethan Corey, Aparna Nathan,
Tyler Santora, Austin Thompson
Intern Maddi Langweil
Executive Editor, Gear & Reviews Stan Horaczek

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ART AND PRODUCTION

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POPSCI.COM / FALL 2023
FROM THE EDITOR
ALAN HABURCHAK
What is reality?
THIS IS THE REAL ANNIE COLBERT writing to you, not an AI
trained on thousands of random tweets, hours of Zoom calls, and
a deep dive into half-finished Google Doc drafts. I did, however, ask
PopSci’s design director to give my headshot a little sizzle with help
from Photoshop’s generative AI fill feature. The results were…well,
see for yourself:
The AI prompts we
fed Photoshop (left
to right): “vacation,”
“Candyland,”
“Muppets,” “holding
a puppy,” “kitten,”
and, of course,
“Popular Science.”
VARIATIONS PRODUCED USING GENERATIVE AI
ORIGINAL PHOTO: ALAN HABURCHAK;
My adventures with two-headed cats and off-brand Muppets

will thankfully not be the issue’s only dip into AI. We dedicated
all seven Ask Us Anything stories in our fall “Fake” issue to an-
swering pressing questions about the real-life impacts of artificial
intelligence—everything from “Could an AI influence an election?”
3
to “Can AI chatbots give good medical advice?”

If you read those questions and thought Absolutely not, but or
Well, maybe, then you can start to understand why the theme of
Fake provoked lively discussions across our newsroom. It’s the nu-
ance, the hazy in-between when something can’t be 100 percent
good, 100 percent bad, or 100 percent anything.
Fake has been used as an insult (“You’re so fake”), a means of dis-
crediting (“fake news,” sigh), and an antithesis of authenticity. But
if we can release our grip on a need for the definitive and wade into
the gray areas, you’ll find complex and subtle details that could
make you question your beliefs about the not quite real.
In this issue, we examine numerous facets of fakeness. Maddie
Stone performs a scratch test on the thriving business of fake crys-
tals, dulling the sparkle of that cotton-candy-colored quartz sold at
a discount on eBay. In rural Colorado, Riley Black visits a fossil re-
construction studio overflowing with bones made not of sediment
tens of millions of years old but of modern materials like polyure-
thane resin. Art and science swirl together in the afterlife with a
photo essay by Ted Cavanaugh that captures the morbid beauty
of taxidermy.
We also wandered off the planet with Tatyana Woodall, who
looks at the future of pioneering space medicine innovations that
could change how we treat the maladies of earthbound humans.
And on the home planet, at CERN, Rahul Rao visits the physicists
attempting an otherworldly triumph: reconstructing our early uni-
verse with help from the Large Hadron Collider.
Finally, in celebration of spooky season, a time for good-natured
tricks and tales of hauntings, Bill Gourgey digs a treat out of our
archives with a look back at a DIY “spiritphone” originally pub-
lished in 1930. I hope our takes on fakes, written entirely by actual
humans, reframe your perceptions of fakery because—boo!—you
never know what’s real.
Cheers to PopSci’s fall 2023 issue from me and my AI-generated
hand!
—Annie Colbert, Editor-in-Chief
AI got the cham-

VARIATION PRODUCED USING GENERATIVE AI
pagne right. The

hand, not so much.
ORIGINAL PHOTO: ALAN HABURCHAK;
NEXT: What was the first AI?
4
ASK US ANYTHING
LIFE IN THE AGE OF AI: FIRST INTELLIGENCE // HOW BOTS CHAT
// VIRTUAL DOCTORS // DANGEROUS ALGORITHMS // CHESS COACHES //
ART WITHOUT ARTISTS // ELECTION MANIPULATION
POSTCARD
What was the first AI?

BY SARAH SLOAT
AI-GENERATED ILLUSTRATION BY DAN SAELINGER
IN THE SUMMER of 1956, a small group of computer science pioneers

convened at Dartmouth College to discuss a new concept: artificial in-
telligence. The vision, in the meeting’s proposal, was that “every aspect
of learning or any other feature of intelligence can in principle be so pre-
cisely described that a machine can be made to simulate it.” Ultimately,
they presented just one operational program, stored on computer punch
cards: the Logic Theorist.
Many have called the Logic Theorist the first AI program, though that
description was debated then—and still is today. The Logic Theorist was
designed to mimic human skills, but there’s disagreement about whether
the invention actually mirrored the human mind and whether a machine
really can replicate the insightfulness of our intelligence. But science
historians view the Logic Theorist as the first program to simulate how
humans use reason to solve complex problems and was among the first
made for a digital processor. It was created in a new system, the Infor-
mation Processing Language, and coding it meant strategically pricking
holes in pieces of paper to be fed into a computer. In just a few hours, the
Logic Theorist proved 38 of 52 theorems in Principia Mathematica, a foun-
dational text of mathematical reasoning.
The Logic Theorist’s design reflects its historical context and the mind
of one of its creators, Herbert Simon, who was not a mathematician but
a political scientist, explains Ekaterina Babintseva, a historian of science
and technology at Purdue University. Simon was interested in how orga-
nizations could enhance rational decision-making. Artificial systems, he
believed, could help people make more sensible choices.
“The type of intelligence the Logic Theorist really emulated was the intel-
ligence of an institution,” Babintseva says. “It’s bureaucratic intelligence.”
5
But Simon also thought there was something fundamentally similar

between human minds and computers, in that he viewed them both as
information-processing systems, says Stephanie Dick, a historian and
assistant professor at Simon Fraser University. While consulting at the
RAND Corporation, a nonprofit research institute, Simon encountered
computer scientist and psychologist Allen Newell, who became his
closest collaborator. Inspired by the heuristic teachings of mathematician
George Pólya, who taught problem-solving, they aimed to replicate Pólya’s
approach to logical, discovery-oriented decision-making with more
intelligent machines.
This stab at human reasoning was written into a program for
JOHNNIAC, an early computer built by RAND. The Logic Theorist proved
Principia’s mathematical theorems through what its creators claimed was
heuristic deductive methodology: It worked backward, making minor
substitutions to possible answers until it reached a conclusion equivalent
to what had already been proven. Before this, computer programs mainly
solved problems by following linear step-by-step instructions.
The Logic Theorist was a breakthrough, says Babintseva, because it
was the first program in symbolic AI, which uses symbols or concepts,
rather than data, to train AI to think like a person. It was the predomi-
nant approach to artificial intelligence until the 1990s, she explains. More
recently, researchers have revived another approach considered at the
1950s Dartmouth conference: mimicking our physical brains through ma-
chine-learning algorithms and neural networks, rather than simulating
how we reason. Combining both methods is viewed by some engineers as
the next phase of AI development.
The Logic Machine’s contemporary critics argued that it didn’t actu-
ally channel heuristic thinking, which includes guesswork and shortcuts,
and instead showed precise trial-and-error problem-solving. In other
words, it could approximate the workings of the human mind but not the
spontaneity of its thoughts. The debate over whether this kind of program
can ever match our brainpower continues. “Artificial intelligence is really
a moving target,” Babintseva says, “and many computer scientists would
tell you that artificial intelligence doesn’t exist.”
NEXT: How do AI chatbots answer my questions?
6
ASK US ANYTHING
EXPLAIN IT LIKE I’M 5
How do AI chatbots answer my questions?

BY CHARLOTTE HU
CHATBOTS MIGHT APPEAR to be complex conversationalists that

respond like real people. But if you take a closer look, they are essentially
an advanced version of a program that finishes your sentences by
predicting which words will come next. Bard, ChatGPT, and other AI
technologies are large language models—a kind of algorithm trained on
exercises similar to the Mad Libs-style questions found on elementary
school quizzes. More simply put, they are human-written instructions
that tell computers how to solve a problem or make a calculation. In this
case, the algorithm uses your prompt and any sentences it comes across
to auto-complete the answer.
Systems like ChatGPT can use only what they’ve gleaned from the web.
“All it’s doing is taking the internet it has access to and then filling in what
would come next,” says Rayid Ghani, a professor in the machine learning
department at Carnegie Mellon University.
Let’s pretend you plugged this sentence into an AI chatbot: “The cat sat
on the ___.” First, the language model would have to know that the miss-
ing word needs to be a noun to make grammatical sense. But it can’t be
any noun—the cat can’t sit on the “democracy,” for one. So the algorithm
scours texts written by humans to get a sense of what cats actually rest on
and picks out the most probable answer. In this scenario, it might deter-
mine the cat sits on the “laptop” 10 percent of the time, on the “table” 20
percent of the time, and on the “chair” 70 percent of the time. The model
would then go with the most likely answer: “chair.”
The system is able to use this prediction process to respond with a full
sentence. If you ask a chatbot, “How are you?” it will generate “I’m” based
on the “you” from the question and then “good” based on what most peo-
ple on the web reply when asked how they are.
The way these programs process information and arrive at a decision
sort of resembles how the human brain behaves. “As simple as this task
[predicting the most likely response] is, it actually requires an incredibly
sophisticated knowledge of both how language works and how the
world works,” says Yoon Kim, a researcher at MIT’s Computer Science
7
and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. “You can think of [chatbots] as

algorithms with little knobs on them. These knobs basically learn on data
that you see out in the wild,” allowing the software to create “probabilities
over the entire English vocab.”
The beauty of language models is that researchers don’t have to rigidly
define any rules or grammar for them to follow. An AI chatbot implic-
itly learns how to form sentences that make sense by consuming tokens,
which are common sequences of characters grouped together taken from
the raw text of books, articles, and websites. All it needs are the patterns
and associations it finds among certain words or phrases.
But these tools often spit out answers that are imprecise or incorrect—
and that’s partly because of how they were schooled. “Language models
are trained on both fiction and nonfiction. They’re trained on every text
that’s out on the internet,” says Kim. If MoonPie tweets that its cookies re-
ally come from the moon, ChatGPT might incorporate that in a write-up
on the product. And if Bard concludes that a cat sat on the democracy af-
ter scanning this article, well, you might have to get more used to the idea.
NEXT: Can AI give us good health advice?
8
ASK US ANYTHING
FORECAST
Can AI give us good health advice?

BY KEITH WAGSTAFF
IF A PATIENT KNEW their doctor was going to give them bad information
during an upcoming appointment, they’d cancel immediately. Generative
artificial intelligence models such as ChatGPT, however, frequently
“hallucinate”—tech industry lingo for making stuff up. So why would
anyone want to use an AI for medical purposes?
Here’s the optimistic scenario: AI tools get trained on vetted medi-
cal literature, as some models in development already do, but they also
scan patient records and smartwatch data. Then, like other generative
AI, they produce text, photos, and even video—personalized to each user
and accurate enough to be helpful. The dystopian version: Governments,
insurance companies, and entrepreneurs push flawed AI to cut costs,
leaving patients desperate for medical care from human clinicians.
Right now, it’s easy to imagine things going wrong, especially because AI
has already been accused of spewing harmful advice online. In late spring,
the National Eating Disorders Association temporarily disabled its chat-
bot after a user claimed it encouraged unhealthy diet habits. But people
in the US can still download apps that use AI to evaluate symptoms. And
some doctors are trying to use the technology, despite its underlying prob-
lems, to communicate more sympathetically with patients.
ChatGPT and other large language models are “very confident, they’re
very articulate, and they’re very often wrong,” says Mark Dredze, a pro-
fessor of computer science at Johns Hopkins University. In short, AI has a
long way to go before people can trust its medical tips.
Still, Dredze is optimistic about the technology’s future. ChatGPT al-
ready gives advice that’s comparable to the recommendations physicians
offer on Reddit forums, his newly published research has found. And
future generative models might complement trips to the doctor, rather
than replace consults completely, says Katie Link, a machine-learning
engineer who specializes in healthcare for Hugging Face, an open-source
AI platform. They could more thoroughly explain treatments and condi-
tions after visits, for example, or help prevent misunderstandings due to
language barriers.
9
In an even rosier outlook, Oishi Banerjee, an artificial intelligence and

healthcare researcher at Harvard Medical School, envisions AI systems
that would weave together multiple data sources. Using photos, patient
records, information from wearable sensors, and more, they could “de-
liver good care anywhere to anyone,” she says. Weird rash on your arm?
She imagines a dermatology app able to analyze a photo and comb
through your recent diet, location data, and medical history to find the
right treatment for you.
As medical AI develops, the industry must keep growing amounts
of patient data secure. But regulators can lay the groundwork now for
responsible progress, says Marzyeh Ghassemi, who leads a machine-
learning lab at MIT. Many hospitals already sell anonymized patient data
to tech companies such as Google; US agencies could require them to
add that information to national data sets to improve medical AI models,
Ghassemi suggests. Additionally, federal audits could review the accuracy
of AI tools used by hospitals and medical groups and cut off valuable
Medicare and Medicaid funding for substandard software. Doctors
shouldn’t just be handed AI tools, either; they should receive extensive
training on how to use them.
It’s easy to see how AI companies might tempt organizations and pa-
tients to sign up for services that can’t be trusted to produce accurate
results. Lawmakers, healthcare providers, tech giants, and entrepre-
neurs need to move ahead with caution. Lives depend on it.
NEXT: How harmful are biased AIs?
10
ASK US ANYTHING
MASTER CLASS
How harmful are biased AIs?

BY TYLER SANTORA
THE FIRST TIME Joy Buolamwini ran into the problem of racial bias in
facial recognition technology, she was an undergraduate at the Georgia
Institute of Technology trying to teach a robot to play peekaboo. The ar-
tificial intelligence system couldn’t recognize Buolamwini’s dark-skinned
face, so she borrowed her white roommate to complete the project. She
didn’t stress too much about it—after all, in the early 2010s, AI was a
fast-developing field, and that type of problem was sure to be fixed soon.
It wasn’t. As a graduate student at the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology in 2015, Buolamwini encountered a similar issue. Facial
recognition technology once again didn’t detect her features—until she
started coding while wearing a white mask. AI, as impressive as it can
be, has a long way to go at one simple task: It can fail, disastrously, to read
Black faces and bodies. Addressing this, Buolamwini says, will require
reimagining how we define successful software, train our algorithms, and
decide for whom specific AI programs should be designed.
While studying at MIT, the programmer confirmed that computers’
bias wasn’t limited to the inability to detect darker faces. Through her
Gender Shades project, which evaluated AI products’ ability to clas-
sify gender, she found that software that designated a person’s gender
as male or female based on a photo was much worse at correctly gen-
dering women and darker-skinned people. For example, although an AI
developed by IBM correctly identified the gender of 88 percent of images
overall, it classified only 67 percent of dark-skinned women as female
compared to correctly noting the gender of nearly 100 percent of light-
skinned men.
“Our metrics of success themselves are skewed,” Buolamwini says.
IBM’s Watson Visual Recognition AI seemed useful for facial recognition,
but when skin tone and gender were considered, it quickly became ap-
parent that the “supercomputer” was failing some demographics. The
project leaders responded within a day of receiving the Gender Shades
study results in 2018 and released a statement detailing how IBM had
been working to improve its product, including by updating training data
11
Programmer
and poet Joy
Buolamwini
wants us to
reimagine how
we train software
and measure its
success.
NAIMA GREEN
and recognition capabilities and evaluating its newer software for bias.
The company improved Watson’s accuracy in identifying dark-skinned
women, shrinking the error rate to about 4 percent.
Prejudiced AI-powered identification software has major implications.
At least four innocent Black men and one woman have been arrested in
the US in recent years after facial recognition technology incorrectly
identified them as criminals, mistaking them for other Black people.
Housing units that use similar automated systems to let tenants into
buildings can leave dark-skinned and female residents stranded outdoors.
That’s why Buolamwini, who is also founder and artist-in-chief of the Al-
gorithmic Justice League, which aims to raise public awareness about
the impacts of AI and support advocates who prevent and counteract its
harms, merges her ethics work with art in a way that humanizes very
technical problems. She has mastered both code and words. “Poetry is a
way of bringing in more people into these urgent and necessary conver-
sations,” she says.
Perhaps Buolamwini’s most famous work is her poem “AI, Ain’t I a
Woman?” In an accompanying video, she demonstrates Watson and other
AIs misidentifying famous Black women such as Ida B. Wells, Oprah Win-
frey, and Michelle Obama as men. “Can machines ever see my queens as
I view them?” she asks. “Can machines ever see our grandmothers as we
knew them?”
This type of bias has long been recognized as a problem in the burgeon-
ing field of AI. But even if developers knew that their product wasn’t good
at recognizing dark-skinned faces, they didn’t necessarily address the
problem. They realized fixing it would take great investment—without
much institutional support, Buolamwini says. “It turned out more often
than not to be a question of priority,” especially with for-profit companies
focused on mass appeal.
Hiring more people of diverse races and genders to work in tech can
lend perspective, but it can’t solve the problem on its own, Buolamwini
adds. Much of the bias derives from data sets required to train comput-
ers, which might not include enough information, such as a large pool of
images of dark-skinned women. Diverse programmers alone can’t build
an unbiased product using a biased data set.
In fact, it’s impossible to fully rid AI of bias because all humans have
biases, Buolamwini says, and their beliefs make their way into code. She
12
wants AI developers to be aware of those mindsets and strive to make

systems that do not propagate discrimination.
This involves being deliberate about which computer programs to use,
and recognizing that specific ones may be needed for different services
in different populations. “We have to move away from a universalist ap-
proach of building one system to rule them all,” Buolamwini explains.
She gave the example of a healthcare AI: A data set trained mainly on
male metrics could lead to signs of disease being missed in female pa-
tients. But that doesn’t mean the model is useless, as it could still benefit
healthcare for one sex. Instead, developers should also consider building
a female-specific model.
But even if it were possible to create unbiased algorithms, they could
still perpetuate harm. For example, a theoretically flawless facial recog-
nition AI could fuel state surveillance if it were rolled out across the US.
(The Transportation Security Administration plans to try voluntary fa-
cial recognition checks in place of manual screening in more than 400
airports in the next several years. The new process might become man-
datory in the more distant future.) “Accurate systems can be abused,”
Buolamwini says. “Sometimes the solution is to not build a tool.”
NEXT: Will AI teach me to be better at chess?
13
ASK US ANYTHING
LITTLE Q
Will AI teach me to be better at chess?

BY ANDREW PAUL
YOU ARE NEVER going to beat the world’s best chess programs. After
decades of training and studying, you might manage a checkmate or two
against Stockfish, Komodo, or another formidable online foe. But if you
tally up every match you ever play against an artificial intelligence, the
final score will land firmly on the side of the machine.
Don’t feel bad. The same goes for the entire human race. Computer vs.
chess master has been a losing prospect since 1997, when IBM’s Deep Blue
beat legendary grandmaster Garry Kasparov in a historic tournament.
The game is now firmly in artificial intelligence’s domain—but these chess
overlords can also improve your game by serving as digital coaches.
That’s where Learn Chess with Dr. Wolf comes into play. Released in
2020, the AI program from Chess.com is a remarkably effective tutor,
able to adapt to your skill level, offer tips and hints, and help you review
past mistakes as you learn new strategies, gambits, and defenses. It’s by
no means the only chess platform designed to teach—Lichess, Shredder
Chess, and Board Game Arena are all solid options. Magnus Carlsen, a
five-time World Chess Championship winner, even has his own tutoring
app, Magnus Trainer.
Dr. Wolf, however, approaches the game a bit differently. “The wish
that we address is to have not just an [AI] opponent, but a coach who
will praise your good moves and explain what they’re doing while they’re
doing it,” says David Joerg, Chess.com’s head of special projects and the
developer behind Dr. Wolf.
The program is similar to the language-learning app Duolingo in some
ways—it makes knowledge accessible and rewards nuances. Players pull
up the interface and begin a game against the AI, which offers real-time
text analysis of both sides’ strategies and movements.
If you make a blunder, the bot points out the error, maybe offers up
a pointer or two, and asks if you want to give it another shot. “Are you
certain?” Dr. Wolf politely asks after my rookie mistake of opening up my
undefended pawn on e4 for capture. From there, I can choose either to
play on or to take back my move. A corrected do-over results in a digi-
14
tal pat on the back from the esteemed doctor, while repeated errors may
push it to course-correct.
“The best teachers in a sport already do [actively train you], and AI
makes it possible for everyone to experience that,” Joerg says. He adds
that Dr. Wolf’s users have something in common with professional chess
players too—they use AI opponents in their daily training regimens.
Experts often rely on the ChessBase platform, which runs its ever-
growing algorithms off powerful computers, feeding them massive
historical match archives. Dr. Wolf, however, isn’t coded for grandmasters
like Carlsen or Hikaru Nakamura; rather, it’s designed to remove amateur
players’ hesitancy about diving into a complex game that’s become even
more imposing thanks to AI dominance.
“I see it not as a playing-field leveler as much as an on-ramp,” says
Joerg. “It makes it possible for people to get in and get comfortable
without the social pressure.” While machines may have a permanent
upper hand in chess, Dr. Wolf shows us, as any good challenger would,
that it all comes down to how you see the board in front of you.
NEXT: How popular is AI art?
15
ASK US ANYTHING
STAT ATTACK
How popular is AI art?

BY MADDI LANGWEIL
HANDMADE ART can be an enchanting expression of the world, whether

it’s displayed above a roaring fireplace, hung inside a chic gallery, or seen
by millions in a museum. But new works don’t always require a human
touch. Computer-generated art has been around since British painter Har-
old Cohen engineered a system, named AARON, to automatically sketch
freehand-like drawings in the early 1970s. But in the past 50 years, and es-
pecially in the past decade, artificial intelligence programs have used neural
networks and machine learning to accomplish much more than pencil lines.
Here are some of the numbers behind the automated art boom.
Six-figure bid
In 2018, a portrait of a blurred man created by Paris-based art collective
Obvious sold for a little more than $400,000, which is about the average
sale price of a home in Connecticut. Christie’s auctioned off Edmond
de Belamy, from La Famille de Belamy, at nearly 45 times the estimated
value—making it the most expensive work of AI art to date.
A giant database
While an artist’s inspiration can come from anything in the world, AI
draws from databases that collect digitized works of human creativity.
LAION-5B, an online set of nearly 6 billion pictures, has enabled com-
puter models like Stable Diffusion to make derivative images, such as the
headshot avatars remixed into superheroic or anime styles that went viral
on Twitter in 2022.
Mass production
A caricaturist on the sidewalk of a busy city can whip up a cheeky por-
trait within a few minutes and a couple dozen drawings a day. Compare
that to popular image generators like DALL-E, which can make millions
of unique images daily. But all that churn comes at a cost. By some esti-
mates, a single generative AI prompt has a carbon footprint four to five
times higher than that of a search engine query.
16
The new impressionism

Polish painter Greg Rutkowski is known for using his classical technique
and style to depict fantastical landscapes and characters such as dragons.
Now AI is imitating it—much to Rutkowski’s displeasure. Stable Diffusion
users have submitted his name as a prompt tens of thousands of times,
according to Lexica, a database of generated art. The painter has joined
other artists in a lawsuit against Midjourney, DeviantArt, and Stability
AI, arguing that those companies violated human creators’ copyrights.
Art critics
Only about one-third of Americans consider AI generators able to pro-
duce “visual images from keywords” a major advance, and fewer than
half think it’s even a minor one, according to a 2022 Pew Research Center
survey. More people say the technology is better suited to boost biology,
medicine, and other fields. But there was one skill that AI rated even
worse in: writing informative news articles like this one.
NEXT: Can AI manipulate a presidential election?
17
ASK US ANYTHING
THE BIG Q
Can AI manipulate a presidential election?

BY KENNETH R. ROSEN
A DYSTOPIAN WORLD fills the frame of the 32-second video. China’s

armed forces invade Taiwan. The action cuts to shuttered storefronts
after a catastrophic banking collapse and San Francisco in a military lock-
down. “Who’s in charge here? It feels like the train is coming off the tracks,”
a narrator says as the clip ends.
Anyone who watched the April ad on YouTube could be forgiven
for seeing echoes of current events in the scenes. But the spliced news
broadcasts and other footage came with a small disclaimer in the top-
left corner: “Built entirely with AI imagery.” Not dramatized or enhanced
with special effects, but all-out generated by artificial intelligence.
The ad spot, produced by the Republican National Committee in re-
sponse to President Joe Biden’s reelection bid, was an omen. Ahead of the
next American presidential election, in 2024, AI is storming into a polit-
ical arena that’s still warped by online interference from foreign states
after 2016 and 2020.
Experts believe its influence will only worsen as voting draws near. “We
are witnessing a pivotal moment where the adversaries of democracy
possess the capability to unleash a technological nuclear explosion,” says
Oren Etzioni, the former CEO of and current advisor to the nonprofit AI2,
a US-based research institute focusing on AI and its implications. “Their
weapons of choice are misinformation and disinformation, wielded with
unparalleled intensity to shape and sway the electorate like never before.”
Regulatory bodies have begun to worry too. Although both major US
parties have embraced AI in their campaigns, Congress has held several
hearings on the tech’s uses and its potential oversight. This summer, as
part of a crackdown on Russian disinformation, the European Union
asked Meta and Google to label content made by AI. In July, those two
companies, plus Microsoft, Amazon, and others, agreed to the White
House’s voluntary guardrails, which includes flagging media produced in
the same way.
It’s possible to defend oneself against misinformation (inaccurate or
misleading claims) and targeted disinformation (malicious and objectively
18
false claims designed to deceive). Voters should consider moving away from
social media to traditional, trusted sources for information on candidates
during the election season. Using sites such as FactCheck.org will help
counter some of the strongest distortion tools. But to truly bust a myth, it’s
important to understand who—or what—is creating the fables.
A trickle to a geyser
As misinformation from past election seasons shows, political interfer-
ence campaigns thrive at scale—which is why the volume and speed of
AI-fueled creation worries experts. OpenAI’s ChatGPT and similar
services have made generating written content easier than ever. These
software tools can create ad scripts as well as bogus news stories and
opinions that pull from seemingly legitimate sources.
“We’ve lowered the barriers of entry to basically everybody,” says
Darrell M. West, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution who writes
regularly about the impacts of AI on governance. “It used to be that to
use sophisticated AI tools, you had to have a technical background.” Now
anyone with an internet connection can use the technology to generate or
disseminate text and images. “We put a Ferrari in the hands of people who
might be used to driving a Subaru,” West adds.
Political campaigns have used AI since at least the 2020 to identify
fundraising audiences and support get-out-the-vote efforts. An increasing
concern is that the more advanced iterations could also be used to auto-
mate robocalls with a robotic impersonation of the candidate supposedly
on the other end of the line.
At a US congressional hearing in May, Sen. Richard Blumenthal of
Connecticut played an audio deepfake his office made—using a script
written by ChatGPT and audio clips from his public speeches—to illus-
trate AI’s efficacy and argue that it should not go unregulated.
At that same hearing, OpenAI’s own CEO, Sam Altman, said misinfor-
mation and targeted disinformation, aimed at manipulating voters, were
what alarmed him most about AI. “We’re going to face an election next
year and these models are getting better,” Altman said, agreeing that
Congress should institute rules for the industry.
Monetizing bots and manipulation

AI may appeal to campaign managers because it’s cheap labor. Virtu-
ally anyone can be a content writer—as in the case of OpenAI, which
trained its models by using underpaid workers in Kenya. The creators of
ChatGPT wrote in 2019 that they worried about the technology lowering
the “costs of disinformation campaigns” and supporting “monetary gain,
a particular political agenda, and/or a desire to create chaos or confu-
sion,” though that didn’t stop them from releasing the software.
Algorithm-trained systems can also assist in the spread of disinforma-
tion, helping code bots that bombard voters with messages. Though the
AI programming method is relatively new, the technique as a whole is not:
A third of pro-Trump Twitter traffic during the first presidential debate
of 2016 was generated by bots, according to an Oxford University study
from that year. A similar tactic was also used days before the 2017 French
presidential election, with social media imposters “leaking” false reports
about Emmanuel Macron.
Such fictitious reports could include fake videos of candidates com-
mitting crimes or making made-up statements. In response to the recent
RNC political ad against Biden, Sam Cornale, the Democratic National
Committee’s executive director, wrote on Twitter that reaching for
AI tools was partly a consequence of the decimation of the Republican
19
“operative class.” But the DNC has also sought to develop AI tools to sup-
port its candidates, primarily for writing fundraising messages tailored
to voters by demographic.
The fault in our software

Both sides of the aisle are poised to benefit from AI—and abuse it—in
the coming election, continuing a tradition of political propaganda and
smear campaigns that can be traced back to at least the 16th century and
the “pamphlet wars.” But experts believe that modern dissemination
strategies, if left unchecked, are particularly dangerous and can hasten
the demise of representative governance and fair elections free from
intimidation.
“What I worry about is that the lessons we learned from other technol-
ogies aren’t going to be integrated into the way AI is developed,” says Alice
E. Marwick, a principal investigator at the Center for Information, Tech-
nology, and Public Life at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
AI often has biases—especially against marginalized genders and peo-
ple of color—that can echo the mainstream political talking points that
already alienate those communities. AI developers could learn from the
ways humans misuse their tools to sway elections and then use those les-
sons to build algorithms that can be held in check. Or they could create
algorithmic tools to verify and fight the false-info generators. OpenAI
predicted the fallout. But it may also have the capacity to lessen it.
NEXT: Why paleontology needs fake fossils
20
WHY PALEONTOLOGY NEEDS

FAKE FOSSILS
A replica of a
Teratophoneus skull
Off a rural road in Colorado, a studio transforms dusty sits in storage at
Gaston Design in
skeletons into dinosaurs beyond our imagination.
Fruita, Colorado.
BY RILEY BLACK
PHOTOGRAPHS BY THEO STROOMER
THERE ARE BONES EVERYWHERE. Black- and purple-painted models of the

horn-faced carnivore Ceratosaurus nasicornis lie arranged by anatomical element in
boxes. The cranium of a crocodile-like creature called a phytosaur rests on a work-
table. Skeletons of dinosaurs, prehistoric mammals, and other wonders are stacked
floor to ceiling in a storeroom. Past it, a Utahraptor ostrommaysi stands midkick,
and the massive skull of the three-horned dinosaur Torosaurus waits to be fitted on
a body. An artist grinds away at the head of the massive armored fish Dunkleosteus,
sanding down its seams.
None of the bones scattered in plain view have been excavated from the ground.
They’re resin likenesses that lead many a visitor to wonder aloud, “Are those fakes?”
when exploring halls of strange and posed prehistoric skeletons. The answer is usu-
ally more complicated than viewers realize—and this busy fossil reconstruction
studio in Fruita, Colorado, illustrates that perfectly.
Most people think of museums as hallowed strongholds of authentic dinosaur
specimens. Each towering Tyrannosaurus or stupendous sauropod embodies life,
death, extinction, survival, and, thanks to Hollywood, the enduring quest of sun-
burned explorers searching distant deserts. A replica doesn’t deliver that same gut
punch of wonder. But that has more to do with our own misconceptions than it does
with scientific reality.
Consider Sue the T. rex, arguably the most famous fossil dinosaur in the world.
21
Standing in its own exhibit in Chicago’s Field Museum, Sue represents at least 80
percent of a full skeleton, making it the most complete specimen ever found of a
“tyrant lizard king.” But paleontologists had to fill in the missing pieces with casts
of other T. rex specimens they dug up. Sue’s real skull sits in a separate case on the
floor, making it look as if the fossil was somehow in a car wreck. The piece is crushed
and distorted from about 67 million years of sitting under layers of heavy sandstone.
The pristine, grinning head seen on display is a scientifically informed artist’s im-
pression of what the living animal looked like.
Fossil curators often stress the difference between casts and the originals,
emphasizing the importance of making copies for display. The Field Museum, Aus-
tralia’s Museums Victoria, and England’s Oxford University Museum of Natural
History all try to get ahead of the “Is it real?” question on their websites. In 2018,
London’s Natural History Museum sent its iconic cast of Diplodocus, “Dippy,” on
Robert Gaston has

focused his craft
on paleontology
replicas and
mounts, including
the Diabloceratops
seen at left, for
almost 30 years.
tour, leading some commenters to surmise with shock that the renowned dinosaur
had always been a fraud. “Let’s face it,” one Huffington Post commenter sneered,
“Dippy isn’t even a dinosaur. She’s a fake.” And it’s not just Dippy—another take
from a paleontology educator on reconstructed dinosaurs conceded that “even the
best fossil casts are going to lack a certain something that the original fossils have,”
though the article failed to dig into what that je ne sais quoi might be. Kids seem to be
especially hung up on whether a bone was once part of a real animal or not. In a 2018
study in the International Journal of Science Education, Part B, one child told survey-
ors that dinosaur casts were “not as special” as original fossils “’cause, eh, you just
know that it’s…a piece of plastic or something.’”
That same kid would probably find most genuine skeletons a letdown. Paleontol-
ogists occasionally uncover a dinosaur from volcanic ash and other sediments with
every bone preserved perfectly in place, but most fossil animals are unearthed in-
complete or damaged. If excavators simply freed them from their encasing rock and
put them on display, museum patrons would be left scratching their heads over jum-
bles of weathered, flattened, and broken bones.
Casts and replicas bring damaged skeletons closer to what they looked like in
real life. So they’re just as important to paleontologists as to they are the public.
Reconstruction expert Rob Gaston notes that most of the specimens he receives
at his workshop, which he opened 27 years ago with his partner Jennifer Schellen-
bach, would not be presentable without artistic intervention. The scraps are a far
cry from the majestic creatures so many museum visitors hope to see. Liberating
fossils from rock is only the first step in bringing a long-extinct animal back to some-
thing resembling life.
“Really, the process is twofold,” the artist says as the team at Gaston Design
22
bustles around the maze of tables and cabinets. “The first thing we do is obtain
pieces from the museum. Those are usually incomplete, broken, distorted.” It’s like
receiving a hand-me-down puzzle with only half the pieces in the box—many of
them in sorry shape.
The process doesn’t end with casting and correcting the original material. Whether
a dinosaur is standing stock-still or running with jaws agape towards visitors, each re-
construction needs a metal armature that sits inside like a second skeleton. What’s
more, the mounts have to be sanded down to remove seams, painted to look like the
original rock, and assembled into their full forms before they leave the shop. The re-
sult is always something you can envision wrapped in muscle, scaly skin, and feathers.
THE SCIENTIFIC COMMUNITY hasn’t always had artists like Gaston on hand to
fix and fit together those jumbled puzzle pieces. The way paleontologists recon-
structed fossil skeletons through much of the 20th century is a perfect example of
how even real bones can warp reality. In the bright halls of the American Museum
After replicas are

molded, seam
chasing is one of
the early steps in
removing excess
material to make
them look more
convincing.
of Natural History in New York City, for example, the iconic Triceratops that’s been
tilting its horns at visitors since 1923 is a composite of several different individuals
of roughly the same size. Likewise, most bones found in the Ice Age asphalt seeps
of Los Angeles’ La Brea Tar Pits turn up jumbled. The chocolate-colored skeletons
standing in the site’s museum have been pieced together from parts that don’t al-
ways fit. If a skeleton is reconstructed from the bones of several animals that lived
in different geographic localities, and perhaps even disparate slices of time, should
it count as real?
Attempts to reconstruct what paleontologists uncover from Earth’s geologic re-
cord are about as old as the field itself. English paleontologist Richard Owen once
mused that plaster copies of fossils might stoke wonder in museum visitors. In 1868,
the English artist Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins worked with Edward Drinker
Cope and Philadelphia naturalist Joseph Leidy to create a complete reconstruction
of Hadrosaurus foulkii, a herbivorous dinosaur that had been uncovered in the marl
pits of southern New Jersey. The real bones were fragile and represented only a por-
tion of the animal’s body, so the team made casts of what they had and sculpted the
rest, creating the one and only mounted nonavian dinosaur at the time. The skeleton
was a huge hit, perhaps inspiring the next generation of paleontologists to create ad-
ditional reconstructions.
The popularity of more finished-looking fossils generated new questions—and
problems—for museums. Creating and assembling casts was a laborious pro-
cess, and the impression that visitors craved original bones led some institutions
to put remains back together with materials like Bondo, an irreversible filler used
23
on automotive and home projects, and to drill through specimens so they could be
slotted onto permanent armatures. In time, paleontologists began to favor casts as
replacements or complements, even as some in the scientific community saw recon-
structions as second-rate.
“I think calling them ‘fakes’ or regarding them as inauthentic doesn’t appreciate
how much preparation, construction, and modeling goes into making real fossils
into objects that are usable for scientific research or display,” says Chris Manias,
a paleontology historian at King’s College London. Instead, casts and reconstruc-
tions exist along a continuum, he notes, filling in the gaps on mounts when needed,
or standing in for missing fossils entirely.
Manias also disagrees that these thoughtful imitations reduce the wonder in-
spired by prehistoric creatures. “Casts and reproductions have always remained
highly important,” he says, a fact underscored by recent exhibits of a long-necked
Next, the molded

bones are scraped,
painted with spray
paint, and then given
a separate “dirt”
wash for an aged
appearance.
herbivore called Patagotitan mayorum at several large museums in the US and En-
gland. This dinosaur, made of casts from multiple incomplete skeletons, stretches
to more than 100 feet long, making it among the largest prehistoric reptiles de-
scribed by paleontologists. At such stupendous size, awe erases any quibbles about
authenticity.
AT THE FRUITA STUDIO, Gaston and his crew of artists excel at blending fact and
speculation. While Gaston has done some repair work on original fossils, partic-
ularly for commercial dealers, he spends most of his time visualizing what fossils
looked like when they were still fresh and unscathed, filling in missing skeletal parts
to create exhibit-worthy animals for universities and museums.
Everything starts at the casting station, which sits just a few steps inside the
workshop door. Copying specimens can be a precarious process given the fragility
of most fossil bone. The key is silicone. Placed within a cushioning cradle—with spe-
cial armatures made for skulls or other large pieces—the fossil is doused in a cloudy,
slimelike liquid polymer that is then left to cure. Gaston and his colleagues peel the
soft shell away once it’s dry, creating a mold. “Your piece comes out, hopefully, with-
out damage,” Gaston says, or at least nothing that can’t be easily repaired. Chips
and cracks aren’t unusual. Such a risk might surprise members of the public, but
specimens face similar threats at every stage from excavation to display. Experts
often break fossils in the field, the lab, and museums. Scientists and preparation
specialists have devised all sorts of adhesives and strategies to extend the afterlife
of ancient bone, including an entire line of fossil-ready superglues called PaleoBond.
Gaston estimates that most of the skeletons he works on require between 100
and 150 distinct molds, which are stored in an on-site warehouse. The resin casts
24
Lindsay Goro
assembles a
Ceratosaurus
model at Gaston
Design. The original
skeleton was found
right in Fruita.
created from those molds are just the beginning of the reconstruction process. The
phytosaur skull sitting on Gaston’s workbench is part of one such project: a beau-
tifully complete cranium of a crocodile-like reptile with sharp teeth about as big
around as a human thumb, discovered by paleontologists from the St. George Di-
nosaur Discovery Site museum in Utah. Sometime after the animal’s death about
220 million years ago, something smashed the skull. “As you can see, it’s really, really
distorted on one side,” Gaston notes, “so while this is a nice, fairly complete skull, it’s
going to need extensive work.” He created a replica from the phytosaur’s mold that
he can cut apart, sculpt, and otherwise fix to look like natural, symmetrical bone and
not a Triassic pancake.
Restoring an animal that lived thousands, millions, or tens of millions of years
ago is a huge challenge. There are usually no fresh skeletons to compare the re-
constructions to for accuracy. Unless paleontologists find a complete, undistorted
head, it can be challenging to tell a species’ actual proportions—how far the back
of the skull flared out, or the exact position of the nasal openings. The large Toro-
saurus lying on the workshop floor, for instance, came from a young creature whose
bones had not yet fully fused. The skull was in fragments when Gaston began work-
ing on it, a three-dimensional puzzle put together according to the anatomy of more
mature horned dinosaur specimens. Closely related species can have the same indi-
vidual bones in their skulls, but with slight variations, and can provide a basic guide
to what should fit where. The goal, Gaston says, is to do as little as possible and not
over-sculpt such reconstructions. A touch of asymmetry in an otherwise beautiful
fossil is better than perfection, which can look unnatural.
At every step of his weekslong process, Gaston keeps museum visitors in mind.
“The conundrum you get in is you want to present a cast as close as it can be of what
was found, but if it’s a public display piece, you want it to be anatomically some-
thing [people] can understand and relate to,” he says. It’s a difficult balancing act,
25
trying to fairly represent the animal while still retaining the texture, color, and over-
all shape of the fossil. “It’s kind of like refinishing an antique, where you might fix
broken parts but you don’t strip the finish off and rebuild,” Gaston explains.
Still, the inference and guesswork involved is often invisible to the public—and
even to artists who base their illustrations on fossil reconstructions. While working
on a relatively new dinosaur from Utah, Nasutoceratops titusi, Gaston had to con-
tend with the fact that the dinosaur’s skull was crushed and the horns were bent
down, almost like a longhorn cattle’s. He decided against cutting the cast apart and
rearranging the horns, leaving them relatively flat instead of angled up. Some de-
cisions have more to do with design or reconstruction capabilities than anatomical
certainty. But artistic re-creations of Nasutoceratops have perpetuated the image
and even exaggerated it, like a game of telephone stretching back millions of years.
The enormous
fish Dunkleosteus
lived during the
Late Devonian
period. You can
see its overlapping
armored plates in
this replica.
Sometimes renderings can be corrected when new evidence turns up. Take
Apatosaurus, which sported a deep and boxy head with spoonlike teeth until paleon-
tologists unveiled the real thing in 1978: a wedge-shaped skull with short, pencillike
teeth. In these cases, regular dinosaur nerds might think paleontologists are simply
making things up. The cachet of authenticity creates a great deal of tension in plan-
ning what to present to the public.
“The main argument you hear is, ‘The public doesn’t want to see casts, they want
to see real things,’” Gaston says. The primary counterpoint is that reconstructing
and mounting original fossils can damage the bones in the process. But, Gaston also
notes, most of the time the original fossils aren’t even fit to display. “Seventy to 75
percent of the material I deal with may be almost a complete skeleton, but it’s all so
badly distorted or mashed that it’s not mountable.” Casting—both for reconstruc-
tion and for repairs—allows dinosaur and other paleontological exhibits to better
show what was once inside living creatures.
A FEW OF GASTON’S re-creations sit in Dinosaur Journey across town. Without

casts, “there would be a lot more labels, a lot more signage trying to translate the
fossil record,” says Julia McHugh, a curator at the museum. It would require a lot
more patience from visitors, perhaps more than they would be willing to give, to
explain the identity and orientation of original fossils. Instead, McHugh and other
curators have often favored placing the original fossils next to reconstructions.
“Then you can say, OK this is what the fossil looks like coming out of the ground; this
is what the fossil would look like in life,” she explains.
Over time, paleontologists have gotten better at collecting, constructing, and
displaying natural specimens. Some of the grand skeletons in the Smithsonian Na-
tional Museum of Natural History’s recently renovated Deep Time exhibit are made
26
Top: A staff
member pours a
fossil mold using
a polyurethane
resin combined
with filler material.
Bottom: Elisa Uribe
de Gaston works on
detailing a replica
Bison latifrons skull,
the largest bovid
ever to live in North
America.
from original bone. But such undertakings have their own constraints. “It’s expen-
sive; it takes a lot of time; it’s very heavy; and those things do not move,” McHugh
says. That means a fossil skeleton of Diplodocus or Tyrannosaurus will have to stand
in one spot for years, if not decades, rather than being part of a more modular mu-
seum that can change as the science does. A cast, she notes, can come apart in
minutes—an advantage that facilities rely on to update their displays or even put
on traveling exhibits.
Downstairs from McHugh’s office at Dinosaur Journey, a Ceratosaurus the length
of a large SUV stands posed like a cat about to jump on a windowsill. It’s the finished
version of the cast in Gaston’s shop. The Jurassic carnivore’s back legs are flexed,
and its long tail makes a sinuous S. Its resin jaws remain half open to let the exhibit
lights gleam off dozens of re-created teeth. The replica was created using bits of
fossil, resting in a nearby glass case, that were picked apart by looters in the nearby
Fruita Paleo Area before paleontologists got to them. Its original skull was also flat-
tened, with both sides of the upper jaw wrenched out of alignment. Casts of other
Ceratosaurus bones helped fill in the missing parts. The limb bones and vertebrae of
the reconstruction obscure the steel that now gives the animal its postmortem form.
But what matters is that the beast looks alive. The sweep of the reptile’s tail
almost begs for visitors to envision the muscles, tendons, blood vessels, and other
soft parts that must have draped around that skeleton when its kind wandered fern-
covered flood plains. Somehow the human-made materials feel closer to the living
animal than the degraded remnants of its ancient biomolecules.
27
Top: The artists use

a paleontological
guide to the
osteology of
Ceratosaurus to
reassemble the
fossil. Bottom:
Occasionally,
Gaston Design will
do life sculpting,
imagining the skin
and other features
of prehistoric
creatures, like this
fictitious dinosaur.
The dichotomy between real and fake crumples when we encounter creatures
that can be revived only through our imaginations. A paleontologist can certainly
work from a collection of bones chipped out of the rock and come up with physi-
cal features and measurements, but such data often feels unsatisfying on its own.
When those pieces mesh with our best guesses about missing bones, we can start
to infer how big the animal was, how it might have acted, and what the Earth was
like when we were nothing more than a distant possibility. These casts and recon-
structions bring our dreams and nightmares from the Age of the Dinosaurs closer
to existence. The dinosaurs we love to gaze at, with their mighty jaws and claws,
don’t come to us straight from the rock, but truly come to life in a workshop off a
rural Colorado road.
NEXT: These space-bound robots could transform the field of emergency medicine
28
THESE SPACE-BOUND ROBOTS

COULD TRANSFORM THE FIELD
OF EMERGENCY MEDICINE
Bioprinted body parts and organic machines have the
potential to save lives on Earth and off it. But how soon
will they be ready?
BY TATYANA WOODALL
ILLUSTRATION BY ZOË VAN DIJK
IN ONE OF HUMANITY’S many possible futures, the fearless explorers tasked

with climbing cloud-splitting mountains in oxygen-poor atmospheres or charting
the low, darkened craters of various alien landscapes would never perish from inju-
ries during perilous scouting expeditions. Nor would they fall ill or sustain genetic
damage, thanks to supercharged hypersleep chambers that would heal otherwise
fatal wounds. As it is today, astronauts don’t have the luxury of being unprepared—
instead they must be equipped to deal with all sorts of medical mishaps, especially
as they experiment with long-term spaceflight beyond the far side of the moon.
Current human-rated spacecraft come stocked with emergency supplies to assist
the crew, mostly everyday things like Band-Aids and aspirin, but also more special-
ized items like hydromorphone injections and those all-too-famous space blankets.
While astronauts on the International Space Station (ISS) have relied on these, as
well as telemedicine calls, to treat ailments and keep a clean bill of health, the fact
is, being on another world could put a serious dent in the capacity of emergency
medical care. NASA notes that all crew members are trained to handle the med-
ical devices on board—but if a complex surgery is needed and the patient can’t be
quickly flown back to Earth, the trainees would have to forge on with limited tools
29
and experience. Thankfully, the worst they’ve faced so far is blood clots.
To plan for these inevitable crises, space agencies have latched on to the sci-
ence of 3D bioprinting to help revolutionize regenerative medicine for life in the
cosmic abyss and on the ground. Researchers have already made strides in bio-
printing—the process of generating living cells and medical products in a manner
similar to 3D printing—creating tissues, skin grafts, and eventually, whole organs
for future transplants, as well as artificial bones that could become “spare parts”
for injured astronauts.
But as demand for smaller, more compact technologies grows, another class
of machines has been rocketing to new heights. Capable of stretching, squeez-
ing, bending, and even twisting to fulfill their tasks, “soft robots” are fabricated
with materials inspired by living tissue such as human skin, instead of the rigid
structures used in traditional remote-controlled systems. This allows robotic
instruments to interact more safely with our bodies and lets surgeons perform
complicated procedures with more accuracy and precision, says Sheila Russo, an
assistant professor at Boston University who specializes in mechanical engineer-
ing design for miniaturized surgical robots.
“I work in a field where we build robots that can help patients survive,” Russo
explains. “We as engineers listen to people that have problems, and we want to engi-
neer a robotic solution to it.” She likes to point to Big Hero 6’s Baymax as a fictional
example of an autonomous soft robot that successfully heals people, either with the
various medical devices it’s equipped with or by offering helpful advice.
Though the doodads in development won’t be able to simply hug anyone's aches
and pains away (yet), they’re lightweight and relatively cheap to produce, making
them easy to transport to remote locations, says Russo. For instance, one lab at
King’s College in the UK is trying to address the limitations of ultrasound by creat-
ing adaptable soft robots that can withstand high-energy sound waves.
As these prototypes gain traction within the greater medical field, there’s still a
long list of quirks and challenges to tackle. But their endless potential could help
humans endure extreme circumstances both on Earth and in the stars.
FLEXIBLE IN SITU 3D BIOPRINTER

Dream Team: The University of New South Wales
Function: Swiss Army knife
ETA: 5–7 years
Acting much like a medical endoscope, this tiny, multifunctional robotic arm
(about 0.8 inches in diameter) can be used to fix damaged body parts directly in-
side a patient’s body. Conventional devices rely on large desktop printers to create
F3DB's printing
head uses hydrau-
lics to flex in three
different directions.
UNSW MEDICAL ROBOTICS LAB
30
artificial tissues, which can then either be kept and grown until mature or im-
planted directly into the body. But this high-cost method often poses risks, such
as structural damage to the faux organ during transport, tissue injuries, and con-
tamination once the part is brought out of a sterile environment.
The flexible in situ 3D bioprinter (F3DB), on the other hand, works by access-
ing hard-to-reach areas of the body via small incisions or through natural orifices
such as the mouth or anus. “About 90 percent of the human body has a tubular
structure,” says Thanh Nho Do, a senior lecturer at UNSW Sydney and one of the
team leads for the project. “If you can develop the technology, [robots] can navi-
gate along this way in any desired direction.”
Once positioned in the target area, F3DB’s multiaxis printing head, which is
mounted on a snakelike extendable arm, bends its nozzle to print in three different
directions, delivers water to wash away blood and tissue, and acts as an electric
scalpel to flag and sever cancerous lesions or tumors. It’s so versatile in its appli-
cations that it could potentially be used as an all-in-one surgical tool for medical
professionals, says Do.
Although this tool is still more than half a decade away from human trials, re-
searchers plan to continue using haptic technology—sensor-filled gadgets that
can convey tactile information—to manipulate the device, so the system could one
day be easily controlled in extreme environments, such as on space stations or in
lunar or Martian settlements.
THE 3D BIOFABRICATION FACILITY

Dream Team: Redwire Space
Function: Knee replacement
ETA: 5–10 years
A recent addition to the ISS, the 3D BioFabrication Facility (BFF) and Advanced
Space Experiment Processor are two separate payloads that combine to make a
powerful 3D bioprinting laboratory. In collaboration with the ISS National Lab
and the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences Center for Biotech-
nology, Redwire’s researchers plan to use it to re-create part of a human knee in
space—specifically the meniscus, cartilage that helps absorb shock and stabilizes
the joint. If successful, it could be the first step in helping to treat severe knee in-
juries for US military service members on Earth.
“A torn meniscus is one of, if not the most common issue that our military have,”
says Ken Savin, the aerospace manufacturing company’s chief scientist. “[It’s] a
day-to-day issue that a lot of people have and translates to the general popula-
tion, so it’s a great target to go after.” The printer itself, which is about the size of a
ISS astronauts have

been putting BFF
to the test since
January 2023.
NASA
31
dorm fridge, cultures pre-harvested adult stem cells into a solution called bio-ink.
After being warmed, fed with liquid nutrients, and stimulated to grow, the mix-
ture can be layered into precise, ultrafine structures aboard the ISS and then
shipped back to Earth. Strong gravitational forces cause the soft tissues to spread
apart like puddles of water, but in space, they can be expected to hold their form
due to the microgravity inherent to the ISS, says Savin.
“When you remove gravity, you open up a whole new field of science,” Savin
says. “It allows you to do things and see things that were otherwise hidden.” Once
the ISS is decommissioned (which will happen after 2030), Redwire aims to con-
tinue advancing its biomanufacturing research aboard Blue Origin’s planned
space station, Orbital Reef.
While the company is now still in the early planning stages of the meniscus proj-
ect, Savin expects it to be a stepping stone to many other medical breakthroughs,
including individualized heart patches that restore cardiac function. Depending
on the size of the 3D-printed tissue, production would likely take less than a day.
And that’s not the only way BFF would move anatomical technologies along. With
future commercialization, the portable lab could help organ-donation hopefuls
avoid long wait times and subpar inorganic replacements.
THE SOFT GROWING ROBOT

Dream Team: University of Minnesota
Function: Infinitely stretching tube
ETA: 10+ years
Inspired by plant roots, pollen tubes, and fungi, engineers at the University of
Minnesota recently developed a process that allows soft robots to exhibit a level
of movement called tip growth, previously seen only in nature. Organisms use this
method to add new cells to the ends of their bodies, enabling them to generate
large, specific structures over time, cross harsh terrain with ease, and navigate
via external stimuli like light or chemical signals.
In 2022, researchers were able to mimic this process in their own robotic
prototype by using a technique called photopolymerization, which uses light to
transform liquid molecules into solid materials. It’s a popular 3D-printing strat-
egy in the medical field, specifically for creating accurate anatomical models of
patients’ bodies, but in this novel application, it allows a soft robot to build its own
body from a liquid monomer solution as it navigates complex environments.
Capable of a number of exploratory tasks as it slinks along its path, this inch-
worm-like device can grow up to speeds of about 5 inches per minute, stretch up
In a lab experiment,
the plant-inspired
robot grows out of
a liquid solution to
MATTHEW HAUSLADEN/ELLISON GROUP/
move along a track.

UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA
32
to about 5 feet, and avoid and even deflect obstacles to reach the deepest recesses
of the human body. The tool could be especially helpful for medical fields like gy-
necology and urology, according to Timothy Kowalewski, an associate professor
of mechanical engineering at the University of Minnesota and a member of the
project. He also sees it making a difference in procedures like automated intuba-
tion and heart attack treatment, where soft catheters are pushed through blood
vessels to stabilize a patient.
THE BIOPRINT FIRSTAID HANDHELD BIOPRINTER

Dream Team: The German Aerospace Center
Function: Cellular Band-Aid
ETA: 5–10 years
Not all soft robots are meant to turn humans into cyborgs with fancy mechanical
parts. One bioprinter prototype, developed by the German Aerospace Center, was
designed to accelerate an astronaut’s own healing process, says Michael Becker,
the project manager for the program.
Like other innovations in space-centered healthcare, the BioPrint FirstAid
Handheld Bioprinter will use cells collected from astronauts before the mission
to prepare cartridges of personalized bio-ink for emergency wound treatment,
like fixing up superficial lesions and even bone fractures. Likely the first-ever
handheld version of a bioprinter in space, the device resembles a compact glue
gun—complete with a printing head, guide wheels, and room to hold two bio-ink
cartridges for easy access and use.
While the machine was created to be completely manually operated, the actual
printing process takes only a few minutes, Becker explains. “You basically put the
printer on your arm or somewhere else and drive over the injured skin.” The noz-
zle then pushes the solution out to create a plaster-like wound covering. In 2021,
ESA astronaut Matthias Maurer demonstrated the technology using simulated
cells during a training session on Earth, and he did it again in 2022 during his Cos-
mic Kiss mission on the ISS.
Having a handheld bioprinter along on a long-duration spaceflight would allow
the crew to quickly provide personalized medical care, but the creators need to
clear two hurdles first: determining just how many bio-ink cartridges would be
needed for a given interplanetary journey and figuring out how to store them in a
stable environment. “The challenge right now [is] to create ink where these cells
can survive for long-term missions,” says Becker.
The team hopes the astronaut-friendly tool finds alternative uses, such as in re-
search missions to harsh environments like Antarctica or for bedridden patients.
The handheld
bioprinter made its
debut on the ISS in
early 2022.
MATTHIAS MAURER/ESA/NASA
33
The magnetic
catheter produces
complex designs
HUAZHONG UNIVERSITY OF SCIENCE
with bio-ink.
AND TECHNOLOGY
THE FERROMAGNETIC SOFT CATHETER ROBOT

Dream Team: Huazhong University of Science and Technology
Function: Magnetic bioprinter
ETA: Decades
Another robot designed to print tissues and organs inside the human body in a
minimally invasive manner, the ferromagnetic soft catheter robot (FSCR) stands
out from its counterparts because it relies on magnets to move about.
“This work provides two very new ideas,” says Jianfeng Zang, a professor at
Huazhong University of Science and Technology whose work revolves around
bridging the gap between hard machines and the soft human body. “One, in that
we can do minimally invasive bioprinting, and the second one is that we use a mag-
netic system to do it.”
Usually, these kinds of medical machines use motors to propel themselves
through the patient’s body. But Zang’s group disperses particles of the rare-earth
metal neodymium down the center of their catheter-shaped robot, which also
doubles as a bioprinter capable of fabricating complex structures. The device
can be swiftly steered via an external computer-controlled magnet to transport
materials like drugs or injectable bio-inks through narrow, winding environ-
ments. It’s also highly durable because neodymium retains its magnetism for
hundreds of years.
Researchers are working to miniaturize the device, which is currently a fraction
of an inch, even further. It could one day offer physicians finer control over the in-
strument’s movements and allow them to complete complex procedures without
radioactive X-rays.
“We just want to use magnetic robots to treat some disease or do some precise
surgery that existing technology cannot do,” says Zang. “It’s our dream.”
NEXT: Your ‘healing’ crystals might not even be crystals
34
YOUR ‘HEALING’ CRYSTALS

MIGHT NOT EVEN BE CRYSTALS
Mislabeled, lab-grown, and made from plastic—fakes
abound in the crystals industry. Who’s going to do
anything about it?
BY MADDIE STONE
PHOTOGRAPHS BY MEGAN MADDEN
NOT LONG AFTER Malika Mathis opened the shipment of clear quartz towers
she’d purchased from a dealer in China, she noticed that something felt off.
“I’m not talking energy or anything,” Mathis, who runs the online crystal shop
Mother Nature Minerals, tells Popular Science. While high-quality quartz crystals
can be very clear, Mathis notes, “I’m looking at it and they’re too clear.”
Small fractures and imperfections pock most natural quartz crystals. Some
flaws are left over from forming under intense heat and pressure deep inside
the Earth. The ones Mathis received had none. Instead, these trinkets contained
free-floating, tiny bubbles, almost invisible to the naked eye—a telltale sign that
they had not formed inside the Earth at all.
To Mathis, the bubbles could mean only one thing: They were made of glass.
When she informed the seller, they denied the crystals were fake and refused
to issue a refund. After PayPal refunded her, the seller told Mathis to keep the
“clear quartz.”
Mathis’ experience is far from unique. The crystal business is rife with forg-
eries and misrepresentations, according to interviews with a dozen industry
insiders, including crystal miners, crystal wholesale and retail businesses, and
mineral identification specialists.
35
Some experts believe that the fake-crystal problem is getting worse. Before
you consider splurging on that sparkly specimen, mull over a few best practices.
The sellers’ methods aren’t always subtle. So how do they get away with peddling
forgeries?
TWO CRYSTAL CAMPS

Crystal collectors typically fall into one of two groups: rockhounds who
approach their hobby scientifically and spiritual types drawn to crystals
for their purported healing properties. Although the two groups have very
different interests, in sham crystals they share a common enemy. And in to-
day’s world of online shopping, fakes of every flavor—including cheaply dyed
stones, mislabeled minerals, and lab-grown substitutes—are ubiquitous. The
pandemic-era healing-crystal boom may be partly to blame for boosting the
public’s appetite for inexpensive stones. But even some in the high-end col-
lectors’ market are growing increasingly concerned about forgeries as fine
mineral specimens skyrocket in value.
“FOR SOME REASON I HAD TO SOLDER A LINK, AND WHEN I DID
THE AQUAMARINE MELTED. THAT WAS A LITTLE DISTURBING.”
—DON OLSON, GEMSTONE SPECIALIST WITH THE U.S. GEOLOGICAL SURVEY
“In the gem trade, fakes are commonplace,” says Gabriela Farfan, the Coralyn
W. Whitney curator of gems and minerals at the Smithsonian National Museum
of Natural History in Washington, D.C. (A gem is a mineral cut and polished for
jewelry, while a mineral crystal is any solid inorganic substance whose atoms
are arranged in an orderly, repeating pattern.) In the broader mineral industry,
Farfan says, many types of “fakes are a relatively new phenomenon.”
GIVING STONES MORE SPARKLE

Long before Etsy and Amazon were flooded with deceptive crystals, Justin
Zzyzx was digging them out of the ground. Early in his career as a mineral
dealer, Zzyzx visited a pay-to-dig emerald mine in North Carolina in search of
treasures. He found a few emeralds, but something about them was strange.
The gemstones had flecks of black biotite. Yet Zzyzx knew, based on the lo-
cal geology, that any emeralds he found should have had white pegmatite
inclusions.
The mine’s owner was unrepentant when Zzyzx confronted him about the mis-
placed minerals. “You found an emerald, right?” Zzyzx recalled the man saying.
The encounter motivated Zzyzx to learn everything he could about how min-
erals can be faked. In 2008, he launched a website, FakeMinerals.com, devoted
to naming and shaming vendors who sold them knowingly. “I’ve got a terrible
black-and-white sense of justice,” he says.
Fifteen years later, Zzyzx, now the general manager at the wholesale crystal
dealer B2B Minerals, has started to see shades of gray in the world of fake crys-
tals. After all, not everyone who sells them is trying to rip buyers off.
Some sellers create artistic arrangements by gluing loose crystals onto a typ-
ically natural mineral matrix, unaware that serious collectors consider that a
forgery. Others simply want to “take a product range and broaden it,” Zzyzx says.
When amethyst, the common purple variety of quartz, is heated to 560 degrees
Celsius, its crystals turn orange. Afterwards, sellers might pass it off as citrine, a
type of quartz that’s far rarer in nature.
36
“Chemically, it’s the same” as citrine that formed inside the Earth, says Yinan
Wang, a geologist who sells crystals and gemstones. As for people heat-treating
amethyst, “That’s been going on probably over a century.”
Other treatments can also give common rocks more sparkle. “Smoky quartz”
is a brown or black variety of quartz that develops in nature when emissions from
radioactive rocks interact with aluminum impurities in the crystal structure. But
most of a variety called Arkansas smoky quartz on the market today has been
artificially irradiated, according to James Zigras of Avant Mining, the largest
quartz crystal producer in the United States. “Aura quartz,” meanwhile, is clear
quartz with a mineral oxide coating baked onto its surface. Aqua aura, a popular
variety, gets its iridescent blue shimmer from tin oxide and gold, Zigras says.
Various fake crystals

purchased from
online sellers.
Avant Mining sells some of its crystals to producers of aqua aura quartz, and
the company itself works with a specialized facility to produce smoky quartz. For
Zigras, the intent is not to trick people.
“That is part of my business,” he says. “We tell everyone it’s been treated.”
THE MAKING OF A FAKE CRYSTAL

But as Zzyzx learned while digging for emeralds years ago, not everyone dis-
closes when their minerals have been manipulated. Even worse, some will
deliberately alter a common mineral to pass it off as something rarer or more
expensive.
A classic trick is carving common minerals into uncommon shapes. Farfan
first noticed this in the mid-aughts. At gem and mineral shows, Farfan says she’s
seen agate, a form of “cryptocrystalline” quartz known for its distinctive banding
patterns, as well as fluorite, the mineral form of calcium fluoride, carved into
unusual spherical forms to “make it look like it’s a unique mineral specimen when
really it’s just a hunk of agate [or fluorite] someone cut up.”
Another classic ruse is dye. The magnesium carbonate mineral magnesite and the
borate mineral howlite both form irregular white nodules. When dyed bright blue,
they look a bit like turquoise to the untrained eye—and they are often sold that way.
“That’s a really popular one,” says Martina Gutfreund, who runs the Etsy shop
SpiritNectarGems. Most turquoise fakes, Gutfreund adds, will reveal their true
colors when dipped in the solvent acetone to dissolve the dye.
Sometimes, sellers won’t even bother manipulating a crystal—they’ll simply
try to pass it off as something more valuable. For years, dealers have been selling
citrine under the deliberately deceptive name “golden topaz” in order to fetch a
higher price. Actual topaz, meanwhile? It’s one of the most common substitutes
for uncut diamonds.
37
In the online shopping era, more outright fakes are slipping onto the market
too. It’s now common to encounter red and yellow pieces of colored cut glass ad-
vertised with fruity, fictional names like “cherry” and “lemon” quartz. Moldavite,
a natural green glass formed by a meteorite impact in Bavaria approximately 15
million years ago, is also faked with human-made glass—a problem that crystal
influencers on TikTok pointed out after the material went viral in 2021.
Obsidian, a type of natural glass formed from volcanic lava flows, is repro-
duced similarly. Obsidian comes in a variety of colors, including black, brown,
and brown-green. But some sellers claim that pieces of bright red or blue glass
are extremely rare forms that experts say do not actually exist.
Emboldened by the internet, today’s mineral fraudsters are even selling
“crystals” made of plastic. Many crystals are easily distinguishable from the
manufactured material based on their heft and hardness. But plastic “amber”
can be tricky to spot, as the real material—made of fossilized tree resin—has a
plasticized quality. Malachite, a bright green copper mineral, often with a banded
appearance, can also be cleverly faked with plastic. People sometimes take
crushed malachite—a byproduct of carving ornamental objects—and use resin
to reconstitute it into what appear to be whole pieces of the mineral. Because
malachite is a relatively dense stone, “it won’t feel like real malachite but it won’t
feel like plastic either,” Gutfruend says.
“IF YOU GO ON EBAY AND TYPE IN ANY SORT OF RARE CRYSTALS, YOU’LL SEE ALL
THESE 99-CENT LISTINGS FROM CHINA AND INDIA, AND THEY’RE ALMOST ALL FAKE.”
—YINAN WANG, GEOLOGIST WHO SELLS CRYSTALS AND GEMSTONES
Even experts can be fooled into purchasing plastic minerals based on convinc-
ing internet photos. Don Olson, a gemstone specialist with the U.S. Geological
Survey, recalls ordering an aquamarine necklace for his daughter on eBay. What
he got wasn’t exactly what was advertised.
“For some reason I had to solder a link, and when I did the aquamarine
melted,” Olson says. “That was a little disturbing.”
Another burgeoning family of fakes is minerals grown in a lab. Rob Lavinsky,
founder of The Arkenstone, a dealer in fine mineral specimens, says that the
techniques for growing quartz in laboratories have vastly improved over the past
decade, and that synthetic quartz in a wide range of colors and shapes is now
being sold online—sometimes with disclosures, but many times without. Much of
it originates in China, leading Lavinsky to believe there is now “huge production”
occurring in the country.
Other experts agree with Lavinsky’s assessment. “China is the home of fake
minerals,” Wang says. Wang suspects that producers in China “are growing
quartz now in large quantities.” Still, Zigras adds, experts typically aren’t fooled
by lab-grown quartz, which forms clusters that are not seen in nature and exhib-
its other clear differences in terms of color, luster, and shape.
Lavinksy says that the recent surge in popularity of crystal healing—the idea,
not scientifically supported, that energy from crystals has positive effects on
your physical and mental well-being—has fueled an enormous consumer appe-
tite for quartz, which producers in China have capitalized on.
“It’s a huge economy for them,” Lavinsky says. Between January and August
2021, China’s Donghai County—also known as the crystal capital of China—sold
nearly $2 billion worth of crystals online, a 40 percent increase from the same
period in 2020, according to state media reports.
38
Whether or not a crystal healer cares that rocks can’t actually cure disease,
most do care about the authenticity of their stones. Yet today, some are buying
human-made materials for their purported healing properties. There are peo-
ple who swear by the power of “Andara crystals,” which sellers will often assert
originated on northern California’s Mount Shasta. Proponents, who can hawk
these brightly colored objects for thousands of dollars, claim Andara crystals are
a type of “esoteric matter” that exhibits “quantum properties at a non-quantum
level.” But most of them appear to be hunks of slag glass left over from industrial
processes.
“It’s the stupidest scam I’ve ever seen,” Gutfreund says.
WHERE ARE THE CRYSTAL POLICE?

A key reason fake crystals flood marketplaces today is the dearth of regula-
tion. Other than general guidance on deceptive practices found in Section 5
of the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) Act, the FTC told Popular Science
it has no rules on how loose crystals and minerals must be represented at
sale. (The agency’s Jewelry Guides do provide clear guidance on how natural
gemstones and their synthetic counterparts can be sold, but those rules don’t
apply to loose crystals that aren’t part of a jewelry item.) All the vendors
contacted by Popular Science describe a Wild West of misrepresented miner-
als online, with no comprehensive action being taken by major platforms like
eBay, Etsy, and Amazon.
“IT’S THE STUPIDEST SCAM I’VE EVER SEEN.”
—MARTINA GUTFREUND, WHO RUNS THE ETSY SHOP SPIRITNECTARGEMS
“If you go on eBay and type in any sort of rare crystals, you’ll see all these 99-
cent listings from China and India, and they’re almost all fake,” Wang says. “But
they make the money. They send it here, there’s nothing you can do, and if eBay
bans it”—which, in Wang’s experience, they don’t—the sellers will “just start a
new account.”
“There is definitely no enforcement, at all,” Gutfreund adds about Etsy. “Defi-
nitely nothing being done.”
An eBay spokesperson tells Popular Science that the platform makes “every
effort” to prevent buyers from being harmed by scams, pointing to the company’s
money-back-guarantee policy, which allows buyers to seek a refund from eBay if
the item they received doesn’t match the listing. Etsy tells Popular Science that
sellers must agree to follow the site’s policies when they open a shop, including
by accurately representing the items they are listing for sale. If an item arrives
that is not as described, a customer may seek a refund through the company’s
purchase protection program. Both platforms declined to respond to claims that
fake crystals are a widespread problem, nor would they say whether they have
taken action against any sellers. Amazon declined to respond on the record for
this story. The FTC declined to answer whether the agency was aware of the fake
crystals issue or has tried to forbid business from selling them.
MINERAL FORENSICS
With regulators missing in action, dealers in the high-end mineral trade have
developed their own safeguard against fakes: sophisticated laboratory tests.
One of the biggest problems in the collectors’ market, Lavinsky of The Arken-
stone says, is people taking loose crystals and precisely fitting them into a
mineral matrix to create a fake specimen that, if actually real, would be worth
tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars. To avoid accidentally selling fakes,
39
Lavinksy sends almost everything he purchases to a laboratory that can verify

its authenticity.
One of those labs is Nimeral Minlab, based in Milan, Italy. Founder Emanuele
Marini got his start in the business by offering mineral cleaning and preparation
services. But over time, more and more clients started asking him to investigate
the authenticity of minerals they suspected had been manipulated. Ferreting out
the dupes is a “need of the market,” Marini says, and it’s now a core part of his
business.
“With some very basic techniques, we are now able to understand if a speci-
men is pristine and genuine, or if it has been manipulated or altered or faked,”
he says.
Testing starts with a thorough visual examination of the specimen to look for
obvious giveaways. Perhaps the crystals have a strange shape not typically asso-
ciated with that mineral, suggesting a nefarious cut or polish. Or the piece might
contain two minerals that don’t typically appear together in nature. Placing the
specimen under an ultraviolet lamp to inspect if pieces were glued together in
an unnatural way can also reveal a forged secret, as many commercial glues will
shine brightly under a UV lamp.
If an expert still has doubts after carefully examining a specimen, other iden-
tification techniques come into play. Those can include raman spectroscopy, in
which laser light is bounced off a specimen, creating a scattering pattern that
represents a unique mineral fingerprint, or X-ray diffraction, in which X-rays
are used to see the crystal structure. Specialists may use microscopes to hunt
for tiny air bubbles that would suggest the presence of a human-made material
like glass or plastic. They might also investigate the optical properties of a stone.
Take a comparison between diamond and topaz, for example. Diamond is singly
refracting, meaning light passes through it and remains a single beam as it exits,
but topaz, a common substitute, is doubly refracting, meaning it can split a beam
of light in two.
Farfan of the Smithsonian, which tests all the minerals it receives in-house
to verify their identity, says that while fakes are an “increasing problem” in the
collector’s world, “most of them are pretty easy to spot.” Marini agrees: “If there
is something fishy or something not straight, it comes out immediately.”
HOW TO NOT GET SCAMMED

At the end of the day, mineral-testing labs are expensive and often cater to
an exclusive set of clients. Depending on the size of the specimen, for those
without hundreds of dollars to spend confirming their new desk ornament is a
genuine, Earth-made chunk of rose quartz, people in the crystal business say
there are a few red flags to look out for when buying. They include unusually
low prices, strange names, and what Wang calls “food-coloring type colors”
like lime green and hot pink. “Natural [common] minerals, aside from one or
two, usually do not come in hot pink,” he explains.
Finding a trustworthy shop is also essential. As a first step, Gutfreund recom-
mends asking sellers where their crystals were mined. If they’re evasive or don’t
know, customers should be on heightened alert. If a vendor is selling treated
stones, like aura quartz or heat-treated citrine, without any disclosures, that’s
another red flag. “If they’re disclosing, that’s a really good sign,” Gutfreund says.
Ultimately, the best protection against fake crystals is knowledge. If you care
about buying authentic stones that showcase the raw, unglittered beauty of the
planet, a little geological knowledge goes a long way. Museums and local rock
clubs are great places to start learning about minerals, while rockhounding
guides can help new collectors learn how to dig up their own natural treasures.
On the other hand, if you just want a colorful trinket to give your mother-in-
law on her birthday, then maybe that pink agate candleholder is fine—as long as
you’re not paying exorbitant prices because the seller claims it’s something rare.
If you do accidentally purchase fake crystals, it can help to embrace a sense
40
of humor about it. In late 2021, science journalist Maya Wei-Haas was sent a
fake “National Geographic healing crystal” Advent calendar by her mother, who
didn’t realize it was a knockoff. Wei-Haas, who covered geology for National Geo-
graphic as a staff writer at the time, says that the box had real rocks and minerals
pictured on the outside. But day by day as she opened each of the 24 flaps, she’d
discover a piece of brightly colored fishbowl glass.
“It made December a lot of fun,” Wei-Haas recalls. “It was the highlight of each
day, actually, to see whether or not I’d get a piece of glass.”
Wei-Haas says that she held out hope for real minerals throughout the entire
Advent season. She got one drab white stone, and to this day she’s not entirely
sure of its origin.
NEXT: Life after death never looked so beautiful
41
LIFE AFTER DEATH NEVER

LOOKED SO BEAUTIFUL
Nature plays tricks on us all the time—taxidermy gives
Divya Anantharaman a way to play back.
PHOTOGRAPHS BY TED CAVANAUGH

TEXT BY SARA KILEY WATSON
WHEN YOU LIVE in a big city, sometimes nature comes at you secondhand—a
photo from the apple farm upstate, eggs in the grocery store. But for Miami-born
and Brooklyn-based Divya Anantharaman, the founder of Gotham Taxidermy, na-
ture is hardly that binary. “Nature is the pigeon that’s on the sidewalk under the
Gowanus Bridge,” they say. “It’s the squirrels you see at the park. It doesn’t exist
in this pristine box separate from humanity.”
In their work, nothing is quite binary. In Anantharaman’s fantastical, ethereal
creations, the beauty of life is captured after death. In many of the pieces, what
you see isn’t strictly textbook science or purely creative. For a two-headed goat
kid, the chances of surviving more than a week are one in 3 million according
to the World Oddities Expo, which now owns this piece. But in Anantharaman’s
work, the joy of being young and alive is frozen in time through anatomical speci-
ficity and an artful eye.
42
↑ Nobody looks their best after death—including adorable little birds. Here, be-
fore skinning it, Anantharaman uses a syringe filled with water and a mild soap
to inject a little life into the bird’s eyes and body.
43
↑ In all of Anantharaman’s work there is a strong sense of kindness, something

that isn’t always seen in the world of taxidermied creatures. Taxidermied bats,
for example, are popular trinkets with a questionable ethical background. These
lifelike Victorian bats are replicas—the gothic aesthetic with no loss of life.
44
↑ The predator-prey dynamic is more than a lion stalking a gazelle on Ani-

mal Planet. Small, unassuming creatures must also compete to survive in the
life-giving, complex ritual. In a transfixed stare-down between a black-throated
magpie and its potential rodent dinner, Anantharaman displays the hunter and
the hunted with a sense of tenderness.
45
↑ One of the biggest misconceptions about taxidermy, Anantharaman says,

is that it’s just embalming. Taxidermy literally means “to move the skin,” they
add. This process requires care and delicacy in removing the slightest bones
and breakable skull so they can be re-created to reflect a living creature’s
symmetry and movement.
46
↑ Rarities draw us in—a lost antique, a precious gem. For some, that
always-out-of-reach prize is a rare or endangered animal. But Anantha-
raman can still build the unattainable, such as by creating a snowy owl
replica using the feathers of chickens and turkeys. With its menacing
glower, you’d never know this Arctic predator is a fake.
47
↑ Like something out of a fairy tale, a curious fawn steps out into a soft
field filled with fruits and flowers. But there is a darker secret to this
project—the laminated butterfly wings that gently cover the young deer’s
petite frame mirror the real-life attraction of the insects to dead bodies.
48
↑ This glowing Chilean flamingo is a work in progress, even if its

dignified face would tell you otherwise. The tiny pins along its graceful
neck are holding the skin and feathers of its deceased form in place
as Anantharaman adds the finishing touches to its wacky, but realistic,
final pose.
49
↑ Many of the creatures in Anantharaman’s menagerie belonged to no

one but themselves, but this cat skull is different. It was once part of an
adored pet, whose owner requested this gorgeous, but often taboo, cele-
bration of life. “With pets, you’re not just working on someone’s memories
of their animal,” they say. “You’re working on the relationship they had to
that animal.”
50
↑ In the process between death and rebirth, bits and pieces of an animal
can shrink or change. In making a creature as dynamic after death as it
was in life, even the finest taxidermists need a little help in the form of a
head or leg when the real thing doesn’t do its subject justice.
51
↑ The history of taxidermy can be painful, presenting often literal repre-

sentations of brutality. But for those given the remains of a rare creature,
honoring its memory for as long as possible can mean revitalizing what is
left of the magnificent beast.
52
↑ This budgie parakeet, another cherished pet, rests in peaceful slumber

just as it did during its life—a bit fluffed out, with a sleepy head tucked
under its wing. The beloved bird’s owner was fond of drawing the sweet
creature in mystical settings, which Anantharaman re-created with a
smattering of soft moss and dainty crystal raindrops.
53
↑ Some taxidermy jobs start in the garbage, like this spectacular casso-
wary. When this mishap was found in a waste facility, not much could be
salvaged. But with patience and a hand-sculpted, wrinkle-filled “dinosaur
head,” Anantharaman was able to go beyond just restoring its former
glory while preserving its traditional essence.
54
↑ Owls have what’s called a facial disc, a cupped arrangement of feathers

surrounding the eyes. In life, this unique feature helps owls collect sound
waves, and the bird can adjust its shape to focus on prey shuffling under
snow cover or hiding in plants. Placing the feathers requires patience,
impeccable grooming, and a sense of humor. “It’s really funny to see it in
this halfway state,” Anantharaman says. “It’s just a little owl in progress.”
55
↑ In museums and scientific displays, the taxidermied creatures might

look far different from the ones we encounter in our day-to-day lives. This
project, which Anantharaman is building for a high school, features de-
ceased local birds collected by an enthusiastic (and permitted, of course)
teacher who hopes to bring an ecological diorama to the classroom.
56
↑ Anantharaman’s workshop is no morgue, but it still requires saws,

respirators, and other devices for the rough-and-tumble aspects
of taxidermy. Keeping an impeccably organized wall of tools is also
emotional for the artist—a celebration of the space they use to create
their multidimensional work.
57
↑ When you think of an artist’s model, your brain may go to a scantily

clad human muse. This starling is certainly nude, but it’s also an expert
poser that Anantharaman can move however they like. Once this speci-
men is out of the freezer, Anantharaman has around 20 minutes to turn it
into a dynamic fighter or a stately presence.
NEXT: The plasma that birthed the early universe
58
THE PLASMA THAT BIRTHED

FROM LEFT: MAXIMILLIEN BRICE/
CERN; CERN; X-RAY: NASA/CXC/
UNIVERSITY OF AMSTERDAM/
N.REA ET AL; OPTICAL: DSS
THE EARLY UNIVERSE
For 30 years, physicists around the world have been trying
to reconstruct how life-giving particles formed after the big
bang. Now they can do it inside a particle accelerator.
BY RAHUL RAO
COLLAGE BY RUSS SMITH
NORMALLY, creating a universe isn’t the job of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC).
Most of the back-breaking science—singling out and tracking Higgs bosons, for
example—from the world’s largest particle accelerator happens when it launches
humble protons at nearly the speed of light.
But for around a month near the end of each year, LHC switches its ammunition
from protons to bullets that are about 208 times heavier: lead ions.
When the LHC crashes those ions into each other, scientists can—if they have
worked everything out properly—glimpse a fleeting droplet of a universe like the
one that ceased to exist a few millionths of a second after the big bang.
This is the story of quark-gluon plasma. Take an atom, any atom. Peel away its
whirling electron clouds to reveal its core, the atomic nucleus. Then, finely dice
the nucleus into its base components, protons and neutrons.
When physicists first split an atomic nucleus in the early 20th century, this was
as far as they got. Protons, neutrons, and electrons formed the entire universe’s
mass—well, those, plus dashes of short-lived electrically charged particles like
muons. But calculations, primitive particle accelerators, and cosmic rays striking
Earth’s atmosphere began to reveal an additional menagerie of esoteric particles:
kaons, pions, hyperons, and others that sound as if they’d give aliens psychic powers.
59
It seemed rather inelegant of the universe to present so many basic ingredients.

Physicists soon figured out that some of those particles weren’t elementary at all,
but combinations of even tinier particles, which they named with a word partly
inspired by James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake: quarks.
Quarks come in six different “flavors,” but the vast majority of the observable
universe consists of just two: up quarks and down quarks. A proton consists of two
up quarks and one down quark; a neutron, two down and one up. (The other four,
in ascending order of heaviness and elusiveness: strange quarks, charm quarks,
beauty quarks, and the top quark.)
The ALICE exper-

iment measures
heavy-ion collisions
(and their aftermath)
with the world’s
WLADYSLAW HENRYK TRZASKA/CERN
longest particle
accelerator, hosted
at CERN.
At this point, the list of ingredients ends. You can’t ordinarily chop a proton or
neutron into quarks in our world; in most cases, quarks can’t exist on their own. But
by the 1970s, physicists had come up with a workaround: heating things up. At a point
that scientists call the Hagedorn temperature, those subatomic particles are reduced
to a high-energy soup of quarks and the even tinier particles that glue them together:
gluons. Scientists dubbed that soup quark-gluon plasma (QGP).
It’s a tantalizing recipe because, again, quarks and gluons can’t normally exist
on their own, and reconstructing them from the larger particles they build is chal-
lenging. “If I give you water, it’s very difficult to tell the properties of [hydrogen
and oxygen atoms],” says Bedangadas Mohanty, a physicist at India’s National In-
stitute of Science Education and Research and at CERN. “Similarly, I can give you
protons, neutrons, pions…but if you really want to study properties of quarks and
gluons, you need them in a box, free.”
This isn’t a recipe you can test in a home oven. In units of the everyday world,
the temperature in a hadronic system is about 3 trillion degrees Fahrenheit—100
thousand times hotter than the center of the sun. The best appliance for the job is
a particle accelerator.
But not just any particle accelerator will do. You need to boost your particles
with sufficient energy. And when scientists set out to create QGP, LHC was no
more than a dream of a distant future. Instead, CERN had an older collider only
about a quarter of LHC’s circumference: the Super Proton Synchrotron (SPS).
As its name suggests, SPS was designed to crash protons into fixed targets. But
by the end of the 1980s, scientists had decided to try swapping out the protons
for heavy ions—lead nuclei—and see what they could manage. In experiment af-
ter experiment across the 1990s, CERN researchers thought they saw something
happening to the nuclei.
“Somewhat to our surprise, already at these relatively low energies, it looked
like we were creating quark-gluon plasma,” says Marco van Leeuwen, a physicist
at Dutch National Institute for Subatomic Physics and at CERN. In 2000, his team
60
claimed they had “compelling evidence” of the achievement.

Across the Atlantic, CERN’s counterparts at Long Island’s Brookhaven Na-
tional Laboratory had been trying their hands with equal parts optimism and
uncertainty. The uncertainty faded around the turn of the millennium, when
Brookhaven switched on the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC), a device de-
signed specifically to create QGP.
“RHIC turned on, and we were deeply within quark-gluon plasma,” says James
Dunlop, a physicist at Brookhaven National Laboratory.
So there are two major QGP factories in the world today: CERN and Brookhaven.
With this pair of colliders, for the brief flickers for which the quantum matter exists in
the world, physicists can watch the plasma materialize in what they call “little bangs.”
At ALICE’s heart
lies a 39-foot-long
JULIEN MARIUS ORDAN/MAXIMILLIEN BRICE/CERN
solenoid magnet,
coiled around a
thermal shield and
a number of fast-
trigger detectors.
GOING BACK AND FORTH IN TIME

The closer in time to the big bang that you travel, the less the universe resembles
your familiar one. As of this writing, the James Webb Space Telescope has possi-
bly observed galaxies from around 320 million years after the big bang. Go farther
back, and you’ll reach a very literal Dark Ages—a time before the first stars, when
there was little to illuminate the universe except the cosmic background.
In this shadowy age, astronomy steadily gives way to subatomic physics. Go even
farther back, to just 380,000 years after the big bang, and electrons are just joining
their nuclei to form atoms. Keep going back; the universe is ever smaller, denser,
hotter. Seconds after the big bang, protons and neutrons haven’t joined together to
form nuclei more complex than hydrogen.
Go back even farther—around a millionth of a second after the big bang—and
the universe is hot enough that quarks and gluons stay split apart. It’s a miniature
version of this universe that physicists seek to create.
Physicists puzzle over that universe in office blocks like the exquisitely modernist
one overlooking CERN’s visitors center. Look out this building’s window, and you
might see the terminus of a Geneva tram line. Cornavin, the city’s main railway sta-
tion, is only 20 minutes away.
CERN physicists Urs Wiedemann and Federico Antinori meet me in their office.
Wiedemann is a theoretical physicist by background; Antinori is an experimental-
ist, presiding over heavy-ion collision runs. Studying QGP requires the talents of
both.
“The existence of quark-gluon plasma we have established,” says Antinori. “What
is most interesting is understanding what kind of animal it is.”
For instance, their colleagues who first created QGP expected to find a sort of
gas. Instead, QGP behaves like a liquid. QGP, in fact, behaves like what’s called a
perfect liquid, one with almost no viscosity. (Yes, the early universe may have been,
61
very briefly, a sort of superheated ocean. Many creation myths might find a distant
mirror inside a particle accelerator.)
Both Antinori and Wiedemann are especially interested in watching the liquid
come into being, watching atomic nuclei rend themselves apart. Some scientists call
the process a “phase transition,” as if creating QGP is like melting snow to create
liquid water. But turning protons and neutrons into QGP is far more than melting
ice; it’s creating a transition into a very different world with fundamentally different
laws of physics. “The symmetries of the world we live in change,” Wiedemann says.
This transition happened in reverse in the very early universe as it cooled down
past the Hagedorn temperature. The quarks and gluons clumped together, forming
the protons and neutrons that, in turn, form the atoms we know and love today.
But physicists struggle to understand this process with mathematics. They come
closer by examining QGP collisions in the lab.
Central detector
components, like
the VZERO scin-
tillator array, were
built to handle the
“ultra-relativistic
energies” of the LHC.
JULIEN MARIUS ORDAN/CERN
QGP is also a laboratory for the strong nuclear force. One of the four fundamental
forces of the universe—alongside gravity, electromagnetism, and the weak nuclear
force that governs certain radioactive processes—the strong nuclear force is what
holds particles together at the hearts of atoms. The gluons in QGP’s name are the
strong nuclear force’s tools. Without them, charged particles would electromagnet-
ically repel each other and atoms would rip themselves apart.
Yet while we know quite a lot about gravity and electromagnetism, the inner
workings of the strong nuclear force remain a secret. Moreover, scientists want to
learn more about the role the strong nuclear force plays.
“You can say, ‘I understand how an electron interacts with a photon,’” says Wie-
demann, “but that doesn’t mean that you understand how a laser functions. That
doesn’t mean that you know why this table doesn’t break down.”
Again, to understand such things, they’ve got to crash heavy ions together.
With the likes of SPS, scientists could look at droplets of QGP and confirm they
existed. But if they wanted to actually peer inside and see their properties at work—
to examine them—they’d need something more powerful.
“It was clear,” says Antinori, “that one had to go to higher energies than were
available at the SPS.”
THE UNIVERSE-FAKING MACHINE

Crossing from CERN’s campus into France, it’s impossible to tell that this
green and pleasant vale—under the grace of the Jura Mountains—sits atop a
62
17-mile-long ring of superconducting magnets and steel. Scattered around that

ring are different experiments and detectors. The search for QGP is headquar-
tered in one such detector.
The road there passes through the glistening hamlet of Saint-Genis-Pouilly,
where many of CERN’s staff live. On the pastoral outskirts sits a cluster of indus-
trial cuboids and cooling towers.
Apart from a mural on the corrugated metal facade overlooking a parking lot,
the complex doesn’t really advertise that this is where scientists look for QGP—
that one of these warehouselike buildings is the outer cocoon of a large ion collider
experiment called, well, A Large Ion Collider Experiment (ALICE).
To date, more than

2,000 physicists
from 40 different
countries have
JAN HOSAN/CERN/FOTOGLORIA AGENCY
been involved with

the decades-long
experiment.
CERN physicist Nima Zardoshti greets me beneath that mural: ALICE’s de-
tector, the QGP-watcher, depicted in a pastel-colored mural. Zardoshti leads
me inside, past a control room that wouldn’t look out of place in a moon-landing
documentary, around a corner covered in sheet metal, and out to a precipice. A
concrete shield caps it, several stories below. “This concrete is what stops radia-
tion,” he explains.
Beneath it, occluded from sight, sits the genuine article, a machine the size of a
small building that weighs nearly the same as the Eiffel Tower. The detector sits
more than 180 feet beneath the ground, accessible by a mine lift. No one is allowed
to go down there while the LHC is running, save for CERN’s fire department, which
needs to move in quickly if any radioactive or hazardous materials combust.
The heavy ions that collide inside that machine don’t originate in this building.
Several miles away sits the old SPS, transformed into LHC’s first steppingstone.
SPS accelerates bunches of lead nuclei up to very near the speed of light. Once
they’re ready, the shorter collider unloads them into the longer one.
But unlike SPS, LHC doesn’t do fixed-target experiments. Instead, ALICE cre-
ates a magnetic squeeze that goads lead beams, racing in opposite directions, into
violently crashing head-on.
Lead ions make fine ingredients. A lead-208 ion has 82 protons and 126 neu-
trons, and both of those are “magic numbers” that help make the nuclei as
spherical as nuclei can become. Spherical nuclei create better collisions. (Across
the Atlantic, Brookhaven’s RHIC uses gold ions.)
ALICE’s detector isn’t a camera; QGP isn’t like a ball of light that you can “see.”
When these lead ions collide at high energies, they erupt into a flash of QGP, which
dissipates into a perfect storm of smaller particles. Instead of watching for light,
the detector watches the particles as they cascade away.
A proton-proton collision might produce a few dozen particles—maybe a hun-
dred, if physicists are lucky. A heavy-ion collision produces several thousand.
63
When heavy ions collide, they create a flash of QGP and spiky jets of more “nor-
mal” particles: often combinations of heavy quarks, like charm and beauty quarks.
The jets pierce through the QGP before they reach the detector. Physicists can re-
construct what the QGP looked like by examining those jets and how they changed
as they passed through.
First those particles crash through silicon chips not unlike the pixels in your
smartphone. Then the particles pass through a time projection chamber: a cylin-
der filled with gas. Still streaking at high energy, they shoot through the gas atoms
like meteors through the upper atmosphere. They knock electrons free of their
atoms, leaving brilliant trails that the chamber can pick up.
After completing
major upgrades
in 2021, the ALICE
team is ready for
JAN HOSAN/CERN/FOTOGLORIA AGENCY
Run 3, where they

aim to increase the
number of particle
collisions they
sample by 50 times.
For fans of particle physics equipment, the time projection chamber makes AL-
ICE special. “It’s super useful, but the downside of it, and why other experiments
don’t use it, is it’s very slow,” says Zardoshti. “The process takes, I think, roughly
something on the order of a millionth of a second.”
ALICE creates about 3.5 terabytes of data—around the equivalent of three full-
length feature films—each second. Physicists process that data to reconstruct the
QGP that produced the particles. Much of that data is processed right here, but
much of it is also processed by a vast global network of computers.
FROM PARTICLE ACCELERATORS TO NEUTRON STARS

Particle physics is a field that always has one foot extended decades into the fu-
ture. While ALICE kicked into operation in 2010, physicists had already begun
sketching it out in the early 1990s, years before scientists had even detected
QGP at all.
One of their current big questions is whether they can make QGP by smashing
ions smaller than lead or gold. They’ve already succeeded with xenon; later this
year, they want to try with an even scanter substance like oxygen. “We want to
see: Where is the transition where we can make this material?” says Zardoshti.
“Is oxygen already too light?” They expect the life-giving element to work. But in
particle physics, there’s no knowing for certain until after the fact.
In the longer term, ALICE’s stewards have big plans. After 2025, the LHC will
shut off for several years for maintenance and upgrades, which will boost the
collider’s energy. Alongside those upgrades will come a wholesale renovation of
ALICE’s detector, scheduled for installation as early as 2033. All of this is planned
out precisely many years in advance.
CERN’s stewards are daring to draft a device for an even more distant future, a
Future Circular Collider that would be more than three times the LHC’s size and
wouldn’t be online till the 2050s. No one is sure yet if it will pan out; if it does, it will
64
require securing an investment of more than 20 billion euros.

Higher energies, larger colliders, and more sensitive detectors all make for
stronger tools in QGP-watchers’ arsenals. The particles they’re seeking are tiny
and incredibly short-lived, and they need those tools to see more of them.
But while particle physicists have spent billions of euros and decades of effort
bringing fragments of the very early universe back into reality, some astrophysi-
cists think the universe might have been showing the same zeal.
ALICE’s inner
tracking system
holds the record for
the biggest pixel
system ever built.
FELIX REIDT/JOCHEN KLEIN/CERN
Instead of a particle accelerator, the universe can avail itself of a far more pow-
erful appliance: a neutron star.
When an immense star, far larger than the mass of our sun, ends its life in a
spectacular supernova, the shard of a core that remains begins to cave in. The
core can’t be too large, or else it will collapse into a black hole. But if the mass is
just right, the core will reach pressures and temperatures that might just tear
atomic nuclei apart into quarks. It’s like the ALICE experiment at scale in a more
natural setting—the unruly universe, where it all began.
NEXT: This gadget from 1930 let people ‘talk’ to the dead—with a magic trick
65
THROWBACK DIY
THIS GADGET FROM 1930 LET

PEOPLE ‘TALK’ TO THE DEAD—
WITH A MAGIC TRICK
How a Popular Science tutorial for building
a ‘spiritphone’ tuned into the hype of the
Golden Age of Magic.
BY BILL GOURGEY
MAGIC FIRST took shape from the occult—from unseen forces once more
popularly believed to flow from the spirit world to alter the course of
mortal events. Throughout history, magicians were seen as aloof figures
mysteriously granted secret knowledge to channel numinous power.
In some cultures and times, magicians held sway as oracles and sha-
mans; in others, they were shunned as sorcerers and witches—or worse.
It wasn’t until the late 19th century that magic made a break from its
mostly mystical roots. Interest in magic grew exponentially into the 20th
century when it became a popular performing art, sparking decades of
fantastic feats of illusion, conjuring, and escapology known as the Golden
Age of Magic.
Given magic’s history, it is particularly apt that in 1930, in the midst
of magic’s heyday, Popular Science offered readers do-it-yourself instruc-
tions for building a “spiritphone”—a gadget capable of making prophecies
by dint of its apparent radio connection with “the land of the departed.”
“The spiritphone,” wrote George S. Greene, “is easy to construct and
still easier to operate, and is one of the most effective tricks for the am-
ateur magician.” The trick’s premise is to guess the name of a famous
66
person secretly picked by a member of the audience.

Slips of blank paper are handed out, and each audience member jots
down the name of a “departed hero or famous [person]” of their own
choosing. The folded slips are then collected in a hat. A member of the
audience is chosen at random to select a folded slip, without peering at
the name. The magician hands that volunteer the spiritphone, but not
before barely turning a fake screw at its base, which brings the name
of a famous person into view on the spiritphone’s dial. The volunteer is
then instructed to ask the spiritphone, via a receiver, what name is on the
slip of paper. The spiritphone “responds,” and the volunteer announces
to the audience what they “hear”—which really means what they see on
the spiritphone’s display. To everyone’s delight, the spiritphone’s answer
matches what’s written on the folded slip of paper. That’s because when
the slips of paper are collected from the audience, with sleight of hand,
the magician tucks them into the hat’s interior sweatband and replaces
them with slips that all bear the same name, preselected by the magician.
The spiritphone has the same
name imprinted on the rotating
display in its interior mechanism, The cover of the
which Greene’s instructions ex- February 1930 issue
plain how to build. featured home
Greene was a longtime Popular projects and asked
Science contributor who covered
if we should abolish
the magic beat, regularly ex-
speed laws.
plaining how tricks worked. One
such article, written in January
1929, “Famous Magic Tricks Ex-
plained,” garnered protest from
POPULAR SCIENCE
readers who didn’t want the mag-

azine to reveal what was behind
the curtain and spoil the charm of
mainstream magic’s spell.
For instance, Greene explained
how escapologists, like the leg-
endary Harry Houdini, could vanish from an enclosed tank filled with
water. Such tanks, it turns out, had a concealed trap door connected to
a man-sized tube that deposited the performer backstage. “To perform
the feat,” Greene explained, “one must, of course, have the ability to stay
under water for the minute or two required.” Houdini could definitely
hold his breath, but did he possess supernatural abilities? According to
Greene, the trick is in the prop. Magicians are “specialists in woodcraft
and metalworking, electricity, and psychology, and the ideas worked out
are, in many cases, equal in cleverness to the products of our modern
inventors.”
In Greene’s time, carnivals were a popular venue for magic, and for-
tune telling was a cornerstone of traveling performances. Remember
the crystal-gazing Omaha magician who becomes the Wizard in L. Frank
Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (an American classic with magic and
illusion at its core)? The rise of television after World War II offered ma-
gicians an opportunity to branch out from their vaudeville roots. Today,
David Copperfield is perhaps one of the best-known practicing illusion-
ists. The 2013 blockbuster movie Now You See Me took illusion to a whole
new level with the assistance of magic consultant (yes, there is such a
profession), David Kwong.
Do-it-yourselfers nostalgic for the simple but clever magical props pop-
ular nearly a century ago can still follow Greene’s detailed spiritphone
instructions. Some woodworking knowledge is a prerequisite, and a few
67
modernizations might make the trick more relatable for a contemporary

audience. For instance, a Bluetooth earbud or headset could replace the
tethered receiver. An enterprising DIY magician might even connect it
to their smartphone so a prerecorded name could be whispered into the
assistant’s ear to match the secret name on the spiritphone’s display.
Oh, and you’ll want to bring your own hat. It’s not likely that anyone in a
2020s audience will be able to offer a 1920s-style felt hat equipped with a
paper-slip-concealing interior sweatband.
68

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Fall 2023

FA L L 2023 Vol. 295, No. 3

Editor-in-Chief Annie Colbert

COVER IMAGE BY Assistant Editor Charlotte Hu

Executive Editor, Gear & Reviews Stan Horaczek

ART AND PRODUCTION

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FROM THE EDITOR

My adventures with two-headed cats and off-brand Muppets

to “Can AI chatbots give good medical advice?”

AI got the cham-

pagne right. The

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In an even rosier outlook, Oishi Banerjee, an artificial intelligence and

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A DYSTOPIAN WORLD fills the frame of the 32-second video. China’s

Monetizing bots and manipulation

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Robert Gaston has

After replicas are

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Top: The artists use

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—DON OLSON, GEMSTONE SPECIALIST WITH THE U.S. GEOLOGICAL SURVEY