Author: Jen Pinkowski

 
When Rebecca Calisi first moved to New York City, she ran into two immediate concerns. First, the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene had encouraged her to have her children tested for lead sometime that year, since the state mandates that children under 6 be tested on an annual basis. The idea seemed sensible, given they had moved into one of the city’s prewar apartments, which are notoriously full of lead paint. Next, she needed to find a new research subject. As a biologist with a specialty in avian biology, Calisi knew a readily available bird species would be best. And in a city like New York, there’s nothing quite so omnipresent as pigeons.

“You could walk outside and sit down on a bench and your subject would come right up to you,” she tells mental_floss.

It was only a short stretch for Calisi to connect the two items on her to-do list—lead levels and pigeons—and before long she was measuring the blood of pigeons from zip codes all over the city. What she found in her survey of 825 birds over five years correlated precisely with data from the city’s health department. Just like human New Yorkers, pigeons are very attached to their neighborhoods. They live in a small area for the majority of their lives, and the birds were exposed to many of the same sources of lead as human residents. Sure enough, her initial results showed that the birds’ blood showed similar levels of contamination. In other words, Calisi found, pigeons were like urban canaries in a coal mine. They were perfect biomarkers for lead contamination.

Now an assistant professor in the Department of Neurobiology, Physiology, and Behavior at the University of California-Davis, Calisi has a new study out in the journal Chemosphere detailing her findings [PDF]. The results clearly showed the link between the health of a city’s human inhabitants and its wildlife.

As cities and their populations expand, engulfing areas previously left for farmland or untouched wilderness, encounters between humans and wildlife are on the rise. Consider the coyotes roaming the streets of New York, or bears in cities all over Southern California. While these confrontations are often framed as antagonistic, viewed through the lens of biological research like Calisi’s, the encounters can actually be mutually beneficial.

For example, Calisi says, “If somebody had been monitoring the levels in lead in pigeons in Flint, Michigan, might there have been warning signs before children started getting sick?” Lead isn’t the only hazardous substance studying birds could detect. She hopes to expand her research to investigate other heavy metals, pesticides, pollutants, and fire retardants in other cities as well as more rural populations.

Calisi isn’t the only person intrigued by what the animals we live beside can teach us about our environment. Scientists at the University of Rochester Medical Center recently found a link between highway pollution and cardiovascular health. The Rochester-based team took lab rats on a road trip between Rochester and Buffalo. The rats, exposed to the same type of pollution as drivers or people living near highways, showed immediate health effects that lasted for up to 14 hours. Their heart rates quickly dropped after exposure to airborne pollutants, and their nervous systems were negatively impacted as well. The study offered new insights into why urban hospitals often seen an uptick in heart attacks on smoggy days.

Then there’s the paper that revealed how artificial lights impact the reproductive systems of European blackbirds (Turdus merula). A study by ecologists and evolutionary biologists at the Max Planck Institute for Ornithology in Radolfzell, Germany found that even low intensities of artificial light can alter the timing of reproductive development in songbirds. Birds exposed to light with an intensity even 20 times lower than the light emitted by a normal street lamp developed their reproductive system as much as a month earlier than birds kept in the dark at night. They also molted earlier. For humans living in the incandescent glow of urban areas, artificial light can be just as harmful: Disrupted circadian rhythms are linked from everything to metabolic disorders to an increased risk of cancer.

 
If it seems like city life is killing its inhabitants—feathered, furred, and bipedal creatures alike—there’s reason for hope. Urban wildlife don’t just reflect the risks of urban living; their rapid evolution hints at how humans might also change to cope. The pressures are undoubtedly great, but for animals that find ways to adapt, there are numerous opportunities to thrive. In one recent study, ornithologists showed that European blackbirds from cities are far less sensitive to stress than their rural cousins. The city birds had a much lower hormonal stress response, which scientists hypothesized could be the result of selective pressures in an urban environment.

These pressures make up a large part of what Jason Munshi-South, an evolutionary biologist, investigates from his lab at Fordham University. With a collection of students and colleagues, Munshi-South has tracked down white-footed mice [PDF] in slivers of parks throughout the city, as well as salamanders and rats. Creatures this small can roam throughout the city and incorporate human infrastructure into their daily needs—though, like pigeons, they tend to stick to a small home area. White-footed mice and salamanders have found a way to exist in tiny pockets of wilderness, surrounded by the rush of 8 million people. And those challenges have led to some surprising rapid adaptations.

“They’ve evolved to eat different diets, to deal with pollution. Their overall life history may evolve if populations are crowded—they’ll have offspring at a younger age. Those are the things we found with white-footed mice,” Munshi-South explains to mental_floss. “With rats, similar things are going to apply. You’ll see adaptations in the skeleton for living in different structural environments.”

For example, he says, “You have a lot of rats in New York City living in underground infrastructure and coming up and down, not burrowing into the ground.”

 
Genetic tests on the rodents have revealed that these changes extend even into the animals’ genomes. Munshi-South said they found evidence that the city critters are becoming distinct from their country relatives simply because of the extreme pressures to survive. And while the differences aren’t yet large enough to separate the two groups into distinct species, it’s a possibility in the future.

The ability of these animals to adapt and thrive in city environments—to live alongside humans and even act as early warning systems for certain pollutants—might seem to suggest that nature will triumph in the face of human progress. But neither Calisi nor Munshi-South are particularly optimistic when it comes to conservation.

“I guess we’re lucky that some species can live in cities and adapt, since most of them can’t,” said Munshi-South. “But I don’t think we’ve figured out a good way to use urbanization as a tool to prevent broader habitat loss yet.”

Calisi just hopes that the species who do manage to build niches in cities will stop being regarded as nuisances or invaders. Instead, she says, we should view them as partners—and acknowledge that we’re all in this rat race together. 

NASA’s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft successfully launched on September 8 from Cape Canaveral, Florida. It will spend the next two years traveling to the asteroid Bennu. After meticulous study of the asteroid, OSIRIS-REx (Origins Spectral Interpretation Resource Identification Security-Regolith Explorer) will eventually touch Bennu’s surface and take a small sample before returning to Earth.

So how does a space-faring robot with no legs or landing gear snatch up asteroid material and bring that sample home to Earth? It uses a highly specialized tool called the Touch-And-Go Sample Acquisition Mechanism, or TAGSAM for short.

HOW IT WORKS

The TAGSAM looks like a pogo stick with a wide suction cup at the bottom. The “stick” is a 10-foot reticulated arm; the suction cup is a sample collection head that’s about the diameter of a dinner plate and as thick as a dictionary. During launch, the whole mechanism was tucked safely inside the spacecraft, and it will stay there during the voyage to Bennu. Following the mapping and characterization of the asteroid, a process that will last two years, the OSIRIS-REx team will identify a scientifically interesting spot, and the sampling phase will begin. The spacecraft will release a protective cover—the team calls it the “garage door”—and the TAGSAM arm will fully extend. OSIRIS-REx’s human support team on Earth will then rehearse how they will collect the sample. They will check thrusters, maneuverability, and the collection arm’s dexterity. They want to be sure that everything is behaving as expected. When the team feels comfortable, the actual collection will begin.

 
The spacecraft will approach Bennu at 10 centimeters per second, the pogo stick perpendicular to the surface. On contact, the collection head will disturb the asteroid surface, and as it presses into the asteroid, it will release a burst of nitrogen gas. This will create a dust-up of sorts, sending regolith—the loose soil and other material covering the solid rock—into a collection chamber. After two years of travel and another year of study, OSIRIS-Rex’s direct contact with Bennu will last just about five seconds.

Scientists have a few expectations about what will happen after that contact. Remember how the Philae lander touched down on comet 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko and then bounced around? That resulted in a bad outcome for Philae but turned out to be great news for the OSIRIS-REx team, because it is counting on the bounce. After the sample collection, the arm’s contact with the asteroid will spring the spacecraft outward. To measure how much material it has collected, it will begin a spin maneuver. The mass of the collected sample will alter the angular momentum of the spinning spacecraft. Changes in spin from before and after collection will reveal how much material it has captured. If an insufficient amount is collected, the spacecraft will be able to “kiss” the asteroid two more times.

Team members are confident that they will get the sample they seek. “We’ve tested this arm extensively over the last decade,” Rich Kuhns, program manager of OSIRIS-REx, said at a press conference held at the Kennedy Space Center on the day of the launch. “We’ve exposed it to vacuums. We’ve exposed it to temperature. We’ve tested it both pre- and-post vibration, and we’ve tested it over a very wide range of materials.” Insufficient collection has never been a problem during testing. The team intends to collect a minimum of 60 grams of asteroid regolith.

Christina Richey, the deputy program scientist of OSIRIS-REx, tells mental_floss that testing suggests the TAGSAM will collect closer to its maximum capacity—just under 5 pounds of material.

The cameras carried by OSIRIS-REx will record TAGSAM’s contact with Bennu’s surface. So even if TAGSAM fails to capture a single atom of regolith, it will have performed an invaluable science experiment. Very little is known about random mechanics in a micro-gravity environment. Just by watching how the regolith behaves when stimulated, scientists will have new data for constructing models.

Once its prodding and spinning tasks are completed, the arm will bring the collection head to the sample return capsule, where the head will detach. Once the capsule seals and the sample is secured, the spacecraft will begin its journey back to Earth.

FROM MACH 35 TO 10 MPH

 
Returning home with a sample of Bennu is the (relatively) easy part. That’s because the sample return capsule is proven technology. In 1999, NASA sent a spacecraft called Stardust to comet Wild 2. Like OSIRIS-REx is meant to do, Stardust collected a sample and brought it back to Earth. Its sample capsule detached and landed successfully in Nevada. OSIRIS-REx will use the same design. In 2023, when OSIRIS-REx arrives back at Earth, it will eject its capsule, and the sample will land using parachutes.

“When it re-enters the environment, it’s traveling 27,000 mph,” said Kuhns. “By the time it gently touches down, it’s moving less than 10.” It’s scheduled to land at the Utah Test and Training Range, a U.S. Air Force installation in the West Desert of Utah. From there, NASA will bring the capsule to the same facility where samples from the Apollo program and the Stardust mission are stored and studied—the Johnson Space Center in Houston. Between now and then, NASA will invest in cutting-edge laboratories and equipment for sample analysis.

What happens next—how the sample will be analyzed—is still being decided. Right now, the team is focused on the mission at hand. “OSIRIS-REx has always had the strategy to go slowly and carefully and methodically,” Dante Lauretta, the leader of the mission, said at the press event. “That’s still going to be our plan.” That’s one of the reasons OSIRIS-REx launched on time and under budget. When the sample collection capsule lands on Earth, the team will still have two years of funding to perform a full sample analysis, with all the attendant science.

In the future, scientists who haven’t been born yet will have pristine Bennu sample material to work with. Only 25 percent of the sample will be used by scientists today. Most will be studied at NASA, but 4 percent will go to the Canadian Space Agency, a mission partner that provided the spacecraft’s laser altimeter, and another 0.5 percent will go to the Japanese Space Agency, reciprocating for the sample of the asteroid Itokawa (sampled by its Hayabusa spacecraft) that it provided to the United States in 2010. The rest—75 percent of the sample—will go into long-term storage for scientists of the future, who will be able to study it using tools and techniques not yet conceived.

The purpose of studying the regolith is to analyze its chemical composition. Scientists will be looking for volatiles and organic molecules such as amino acids. This will help explain the role of meteorites in the creation of life on Earth. If they helped us along, they might well have helped other planets develop life as well.

As for OSIRIS-Rex’s timeline, after its successful launch, the next step will be to go into orbit around the Sun before meeting Earth again in September 2017. It will then fly under Antarctica in order to bend its trajectory and slingshot to Bennu. (The trajectory adjustment is necessary because the asteroid is located 6 degrees off of the orbital plane of Earth.) It will make its approach of Bennu in 2018, where it will spend a year, and another year in the sampling process. The return window for its voyage to Earth opens in March 2021.

After OSIRIS-REx reaches home two years later and jettisons the sample capsule, it will remain in space. It will likely still have fuel and be fully functional, with a working payload of cameras, spectrometers, and a laser altimeter. At that time, NASA will have to decide whether to extend its mission, possibly sending it back to deep space where it can continue its charge of exploring the unknown.

In January 1939, an ordinary American couple, Waitstill and Martha Sharp, said yes to a mission that 17 others in their Unitarian congregation in Wellesley, Massachusetts had refused. Their willingness to step up would go on to save the lives of hundreds of Jewish refugees fleeing Nazi Germany before and during World War II. The Sharps’ grandson, Artemis Joukowsky, has co-directed a documentary about his grandparents’ heroic past, called Defying the Nazis: The Sharps’ War, with renowned filmmaker Ken Burns, to be aired on PBS on September 20.

Joukowsky, a filmmaker and private investor, didn’t know much about his grandparents’ remarkable past until the ninth grade, when he had to interview a person of moral courage for a high school project in New York City. His mother suggested his maternal grandmother, Martha. “Little did I know my grandmother had worked in the underground, that she had evaded and defied Nazi officials, that she had this whole life with my grandfather I had never known about,” Joukowsky tells mental_floss.

When the Sharps said yes to their mission, billed as an “intervention against evil,” it was only supposed to last several months; after all, they would have to leave behind their two young children and a comfortable life in Wellesley, where Waitstill was a Unitarian minister and Martha a former social worker. Instead, their mission would continue on and off for several years—and inform their work for the rest of their lives.

While it may seem odd that a couple with no Jewish ancestry themselves would undertake such a monumental task, Joukowsky says, “Unitarians view Jews very much as their brothers and sisters, because Jesus was a Jew.” In his view, Unitarianism is like a Christian version of reform Judaism. His grandparents, he says, “were active humanists in the sense that everyone is valued and important.”

When they arrived in Prague, Czechoslovakia on February 23, 1939, the Sharps found themselves in a train station teeming with crying women and children whose only hope of rescue was that their husbands could get out of the country and send for them later. By then, Germany was urging Jews to leave the country, and more than 200,000 of the more than 500,000 Jews that had lived in Germany in 1933 had left. Many were stuck in stop-over European countries, including Czechoslovakia, still seeking a final home, while thousands of others were already being sent to concentration camps.

Joukowsky says that judging from his grandmother’s journals from the time, the couple understood the magnitude of the work ahead of them. Working with Czech Unitarians and other refugee supporters, they quickly learned techniques for deciphering cryptic memos in German; how to destroy incriminating messages that they sent to each other; how to evade Gestapo who followed and spied on them; and how to falsify and forge papers and documents necessary to get people out of the country. Martha put her own life at risk when, along with the Quakers’ American Friends Service Committee, which ran its own underground, she rode a train full of Jewish women and children with falsified papers straight through the heart of Nazi Germany itself, en route to the Dutch border. They were followed, searched, questioned, and under constant scrutiny.

Had they been caught, the consequences of their actions would have been at least imprisonment and more likely execution. Yet they persisted in their efforts until August 1939, when Waitstill was denied re-entry from Geneva, and Martha got word through her underground network that she would be arrested if she stayed in Prague. A few days later, they were on a ship back to the U.S. when Germany invaded Poland and Britain declared war, putting their ship in danger as a potential target of German warships.

They made it back to the U.S. for a brief reunion with their children, who in their absence had been cared for by friends, but they weren’t home for long. By the spring of 1940, the president of the American Unitarian Association, Frederick Eliot—who was also a friend—contacted the Sharps. Eliot insisted they return to Europe, where the refugee crisis had only worsened.

Despite misgivings about leaving their children yet again, they returned to the continent, this time setting up camp in Lisbon, Portugal, and working to help refugees fleeing occupied France. Perhaps as penance for her own left-behind children, Martha eventually became heavily involved in helping children flee, and she stayed in Europe for several months after Waitstill returned to the U.S. The children she helped were eventually able to emigrate to the United States.

Though it is impossible to count the exact number, since many documents were destroyed, Joukowsky estimates they saved “hundreds” of refugees from their deaths, many of whom were children. Yet despite all they did, for every person they helped flee the Nazis—not all of whom were Jewish—there were thousands more they couldn’t help, which Joukowsky says caused them great anguish and guilt. “They were devastated by all the people they couldn’t help,” he says. “They were angry at the U.S. government for being so anti-Semitic.”

Even after they both returned home in 1941 and got back to the task of raising their two children—and though their marriage suffered—they continued to work with refugees and other political causes for the rest of their lives. After the war, Martha stayed active in her causes, and even mounted a failed campaign for Congress; she was defeated by Joseph W. Martin Jr., a Massachusetts Republican who became Speaker of the House the following year. She later worked for the National Security Resources Board under the Truman Administration. And she kept up the work of social justice on behalf of Jews, helping to found “Children to Palestine,” an interfaith effort to bring European Jewish refugee children to new homes in what is Israel today. She died in 1999. Waitstill continued to work as a Unitarian minister and gave his support to a number of organizations. He passed away in 1984.

On June 13, 2006, the Israeli government honored the Sharps with its special title, “Righteous Among the Nations,” given to non-Jews who risked their lives to save Jews during the Holocaust. The Sharps were only the second and third U.S. citizens, after Varian Fry, to receive this title.

When Joukowsky sent a rough cut of his film to Ken Burns for potential collaboration, he knew he was taking a big risk. Burns tells mental_floss that he is “bombarded all the time” by “tubs” of DVDs and films that people hope he’ll screen, comment on, and collaborate on. He rarely has time to offer feedback.

However, Burns immediately felt a spark while watching Defying the Nazis. “It was clearly a good, complicated story, and there at its beating heart was this fundamental question that the Sharps presumed everybody would [do what they did],” he says. “I loved this existential question: Would I be able to do the kinds of things the Sharps did in service of other people they had no idea about?”

He agreed to work on the project as co-director, re-editing the film and bringing Tom Hanks on to do the voiceover narration of Waitstill.

The questions the documentary raised for Burns are the same ones that have informed Joukowsky’s entire life. When he was diagnosed at 14 with spinal muscular atrophy, his grandmother Martha would come to the hospital and say, “You’re not going to feel for sorry for yourself. Let’s get out and help other people,” he recalls. “She really taught me to go outside myself—to not focus on my own troubles or my own issues.”

Joukowsky partnered with the Facing History and Ourselves project to teach a unit on his grandparents and explore ideas of moral courage. Through his foundation, the Joukowsky Family Foundation, he created The Sharp Prize, a social justice award that “promotes humanitarian work in the example of Waitstill and Martha Sharp and seeks to empower rescuers today who are risking their lives for others.” In 2015, it gave out its first prize of $10,000 to Marina Goldman, of the Katanya Women’s Development Association, for her community work with women and children in Sierra Leone, and this year awarded $25,000 to Team Woodhouse, an organization that raised funds to send rescue workers directly to Lesvos, Greece, where they provided food, clothing, and shelter to more than 1000 Syrian refugees.

Joukowsky feels Defying the Nazis is relevant to today’s political and cultural climate. “I think the most beautiful part of this story is that it really resonates with today in a way that’s almost uncanny in terms of the isolationism of America, the confusion about race in America, the xenophobic taunting of Muslims,” he says. “I think it’s a very timely conversation.”

Burns concurs. “We see demagoguery today, we see the impulse to go [to] the basest parts of ourselves—and we also see ourselves being called by what Lincoln said were the better angels of our nature,” he says. “The Sharps were about that.”

All images: screencaps from PBS’s trailer for Defying the Nazis: The Sharps’ War

The western Pacific Ocean is known to harbor some nasty typhoons, but Super Typhoon Meranti is a rare breed of danger. This powerful cyclone, which made landfall in China on Thursday, September 15, now sits in the record books as one of the most powerful tropical cyclones ever recorded in the Northern Hemisphere, and the strongest storm on Earth in 2016. The storm did hit some populated areas, but the worst conditions missed the largest city centers, sparing southeast Asia from the full horror of yet another scale-topping typhoon.

Super Typhoon Meranti peaked on Wednesday with maximum sustained winds of 190 mph before it scraped the southern tip of Taiwan and moved northwest toward mainland China, which would make it the equivalent of a category 5 on the Saffir-Simpson Hurricane Wind Scale.

To put Meranti’s ferocity into perspective, we only have reliable records of one hurricane in the Atlantic Ocean (Allen in 1980) reaching maximum winds of 190 mph, and Meranti is now among the top 10 strongest storms ever recorded in the Pacific Ocean. The typhoon’s lowest surface air pressure also dipped below 900 millibars, which places it among only a handful of storms to achieve this feat. Standard air pressure at sea level is 1013 millibars, and under normal conditions at sea level, the atmospheric air pressure doesn’t drop below 900 millibars until you’re a few thousand feet above the surface.

 
The piercing eye of Super Typhoon Meranti tracked just a few miles off the southern tip of Taiwan, focusing some of its strongest winds on Hengchun Township (population 30,000), but thankfully the core of the worst winds missed land. Residents of southern Taiwan were even more fortunate that Meranti didn’t make landfall as the storm’s eye was going through cycloidal oscillations as it drew closer to the island nation.

Cycloidal oscillations occur when the eye itself wobbles in a looping motion as strong thunderstorms bubble up in the eyewall and “tug” the eye toward them. As these strong storms rotated around the eyewall, they kept tugging the eye in their direction, causing the eye to wobble around as the whole storm kept moving northwest. If you traced these wobbles on a map, it would create little squiggles in the storm’s track. It doesn’t seem like much, but even a tiny shift in the eyewall’s location could mean the difference between a devastating storm and complete destruction.

While Taiwan missed the absolute worst of the storm, areas nearby weren’t so lucky. The island province of Batanes makes up the northernmost part of the Philippines, and this archipelago found itself directly in Meranti’s eyewall on Tuesday night and Wednesday morning.

 
The typhoon, which is known as “Ferdie” instead of Meranti in the Philippines, made landfall on the tiny island of Itbayat early Wednesday morning around sunrise, unleashing its full fury on the tiny strip of land that’s about 40 percent the size of Guam and home to around 3000 people. Due to one of those eye wobbles, the entire island fell within Meranti’s eye with room to spare, giving residents a brief reprieve before the extreme winds ripped back from the other direction. The typhoon severed all lines of communication between Batanes province, which includes Itbayat, and the rest of the Philippines Thursday morning. By the time it moved out, it had done an estimated $4.7 million U.S. in damage to the province.

A report in the Taipei Times indicates that the storm injured nine people and caused damage across Taiwan, knocking out power to more than 700,000 homes and businesses during the height of the storm. A weather station in Hengchun Township recorded winds of more than 105 mph, which the paper reports is an all-time record there since the station was established in the late 1800s. Taiwan now faces $21 million U.S. in agricultural losses.

After hitting the Philippines and Taiwan, Meranti continued on to its final landfall in mainland China as a powerful but weakening typhoon. The storm fell below the equivalent status of a major hurricane by the time it hit the mainland early on Thursday morning, but the storm made landfall very near Zhangzhou, a city that’s home to nearly five million people—a larger population than Los Angeles. In all, 14 died, dozens were injured, and 14 more are still missing. Some 33 million people were relocated, and 1600 homes were destroyed.

This one is for our readers on the other side of the globe from our main office. If you live in the Eastern Hemisphere, look up tonight and you’ll notice something strange going on with the Moon. It’ll be full, oh yes, and big, but with a pronounced darkness at its upper half. The best time to see it will be 19:05 UTC (3:05 pm EDT). It will be the kind of full moon that looks like it’s been through an Instagram filter—maybe Ludwig or X-Pro II. So what in the world is going on up there?

THE ECLIPSE THAT COULDN’T QUITE MAKE IT

In our light-polluted modern world, the sky can seem pretty boring. Hazy black nights and smoggy white mornings. There are rain clouds, some lightning on occasion, and the Sun and Moon, constant and reliable, up and down, east and west. But don’t be fooled. The solar system—our solar system—is a teeming, dynamic system where shadows and light interplay constantly, with beauty and grace.

The Earth casts a pretty large shadow. Sometimes, when orbital dynamics are being generous, the Earth, Sun, and Moon line up just so. When the Moon is between the Sun and the Earth, blotting out our star but for a blinding corona along the rim—a pitch orb ringed in flame—you have a solar eclipse. Next year the United States will be treated to just such an eclipse, its shadow creeping across the North American continent in a line from Washington state to South Carolina.

When the celestial objects are reversed, and the Earth lines up between the Sun and the Moon, you get a total lunar eclipse. What that occurs, the darkest part of our shadow—the umbra—blankets the Moon, blotting it out, denying it sunlight. Sometimes, though, things aren’t quite so total. Sometimes the Moon passes into the Earth’s shadow, but not its umbra. When the Moon crosses into the outer shadow of the Earth—where the Sun’s rays are not blocked entirely—the Moon is darkened but not blackened. This is called a penumbral eclipse, and it’s what you’re going to see tonight. A good portion of the lunar surface is cast in a grim pall. If you’re the kind of person who enjoys creepy sights in the night sky, tonight is going to be your goth Christmas morning.

IN THE WESTERN HEMISPHERE? LIVESTREAM IT

Because this is the last full moon before autumn equinox, tonight’s full moon is called the harvest moon. The name comes from ye olden days, when the light of the full moon gave farmers a little more time with which they might harvest their crops. The autumn equinox is the point in the Earth’s orbit in which the Sun shines directly on the Earth’s equator, meaning the whole world experiences a day and night of equal length. This year the autumn equinox will fall on September 22. It is the first day of fall.

This is the last eclipse of 2016. This is also the second eclipsed harvest moon in two years. (You might recall last year’s super red harvest moon.) Moreover, this is the last eclipsed harvest moon until 2024. (That year will also herald North America’s next total solar eclipse, should you miss the one in 2017.) If you live in the Western Hemisphere and want to be part of the penumbral lunar eclipse action, there is hope. Slooh is hosting a livestream of the event, which began at 11:30 a.m. EDT, complete with scientists explaining the mechanics of the event. It won’t be as good as the real thing, but you can screenshot it, apply X-Pro II, and post it to Instagram, and no one will be the wiser.

 
When you think of the danger a hurricane poses to the unlucky people caught in its path, your first thought is probably the ferocious winds that crash ashore and tear up just about everything exposed to the elements. While the winds are destructive and the flying debris is a serious hazard to anyone caught in the way, the greatest and quietest killer in a tropical cyclone is its storm surge.

1. A SURGE IS A SUDDEN INUNDATION OF SEA WATER.

The strong winds of a landfalling tropical cyclone thrust it inland. The flooding that results from storm surges is only a few feet deep most of the time, but the worst surges—like those seen in Hurricane Katrina—can exceed 20 feet or higher. A storm surge comes up quickly and can push water miles inland in the most vulnerable spots during the strongest storms.

2. THEY’RE NOT CAUSED BY HURRICANES ALONE.

Hurricanes are most closely associated with storm surges, but they’re not the only storms that can push water inland. Tropical depressions and tropical storms can also inundate coastlines if their winds are strong enough. Powerful winter storms can also generate a life-threatening storm surge. A blizzard that hit the East Coast in January 2016 produced a storm surge in Cape May, New Jersey, that was slightly higher than the one recorded there during Hurricane Sandy a few years earlier. 

3. TRACK AND TIMING MATTER …

 
We tell people not to focus on the exact track of a tropical cyclone since the impacts can extend hundreds of miles from the center of the storm. But when it comes to a storm surge, track really does matter. The worst winds in a storm occur in the right-front quadrant of its eyewall, or the part of the storm that’s in front of the eye and to the right of its forward movement. This spot sees the strongest winds influenced by the forward motion of the storm, and it’s where the wind is able to push the most water with it.

Timing also determines how much flooding people at the coast will experience. Coastal flooding will be worse if a storm hits land at high tide since water will be a few feet higher. That couple of feet at high tide doesn’t seem like much, but it can mean the difference between a few roads washed out and a few neighborhoods inundated by water.

4. … BUT WIND MATTERS MORE.

The fury behind the surge is wind. The National Hurricane Center says that 95 percent of storm surge is driven by the wind—the other 5 percent is water that rises above sea level due to low air pressure at the center of the storm. A general (and obvious) rule of thumb is that a stronger storm will produce a more destructive storm surge, but surge also depends on other factors like a storm’s forward speed and the size of its wind field.

5. WIND IS WHY SANDY WAS SO DEVASTATING.

 
Even though Hurricane Sandy only had 80 mph winds when it made landfall in New Jersey on October 29, 2012, it was one of the most destructive storms to hit the United States in recorded history. The devastating storm surge that Sandy drove into coastal communities was the result of the immense size of the storm’s wind field.

When Sandy made landfall, the area covered by its tropical storm force winds (39–74 mph) covered more than 1100 miles from South Carolina to Maine. The enormous area covered by these strong winds made up for the storm’s relative lack of concentrated intensity, allowing it to push tremendous amounts of water into the coast.

Hurricane Katrina’s historic storm surge along the northern Gulf Coast in August 2005 was also driven by the sheer size of the storm. Katrina was a massive hurricane with scale-topping category 5 winds to boot. Katrina weakened by the time it reached the coast, but the size of the storm and its former strength still pushed enormous amounts of water into Louisiana and Mississippi.

6. CURVY COASTS MAKE A BAD SITUATION WORSE.

As if getting hit with a bad storm weren’t bad enough, the very shape of the coastline itself will determine how much of an impact a storm surge will have on coastal communities. Shallow waters offshore and concave bays and inlets will exacerbate a storm surge and make the inundation deeper than it would have been otherwise.

7. LINGERING STORMS DO MORE DAMAGE.

After it made landfall in Florida and moved into the Atlantic Ocean, meteorologists were worried about tropical storm Hermine’s impacts along the Mid-Atlantic and New England coastlines because of how long they expected the storm to linger near land. Forecasts called for Hermine to meander off the coast of New Jersey at or near hurricane strength for four full days before beginning to dissipate. Thankfully, the worst-case scenarios didn’t come to pass, but the threat was real.

Even though Hermine wasn’t forecast to make landfall, the exceptionally long duration of the storm—powerful winds blowing inland for days at a time—threatened to generate a large storm surge along the coast. A slow-moving storm will cause more damage than one that moves through in a matter of hours. 

 
On March 6, 2016, just before Kris Boesen’s 21^st birthday, his car skidded across a wet road in Bakersfield, California and slammed into a telephone pole. He broke bones in his neck and suffered a traumatic injury to his cervical spine that left him paralyzed from the neck down. However, thanks to a bit of luck and timing, he qualified for a current clinical trial conducted as a partnership between Rancho Los Amigos National Rehabilitation Center and Keck Medicine at the University of Southern California (USC), headed up by Charles Liu, director of the USC Neurorestoration Center. Today, Kris can move his arms and hands, operate his motorized wheelchair, breathe on his own—and even feel some sensation below the waist.

In April, just five weeks after his accident, researchers injected an experimental dose of 10 million AST-OPC1 cells into Kris’s cervical spinal cord. These AST-OPC1 cells were developed by Asterias Biotherapeutics, in Fremont, California from embryonic stem cells, which they converted into oligodendrocyte progenitor cells (OPCs) normally found in the brain and spinal cord of healthy bodies.

When a spinal cord injury occurs, Liu tells mental_floss, “The neurons can die, the axons can be severed, or the myelin can be damaged.” These AST-OPC1 cells have been designed to address the myelination and are neuroregenerative—that is, they can restore connections and tissue within the spinal cord, thus potentially restore feeling and movement to the limbs.

“Quite frankly, my expectations were not very high,” Liu says. “People have been talking about regenerative medicine for a while now, but in the nervous system we haven’t had a whole lot of success.”

Kris has what is known as a grade A injury on the ASIA scale (American Spinal Injury Association). This means he couldn’t move anything more than the smallest shrug of the shoulders at the neck line, and nothing from the neck down. Rodney Boesen, Kris’s father, tells mental_floss that he recalls Liu saying he hoped that at most Kris might be able to move from a grade A injury to a grade B, which means he’d regain some feeling below the neck. “The real key word there was hope,” says Rodney.

Six weeks after the stem cell therapy, Kris left the hospital. And now, just five months after the treatment, hope has become a reality: Kris has surpassed everyone’s expectations and “moved up two additional motor levels,” says Liu, which he calls “extremely significant,” adding, “Think of all these patients that are quadriplegic: they’re basically not able to move their arms or legs. Now you can turn them into patients who can actually brush their teeth and do stuff for themselves.”

Indeed, Kris can now do most everything with his hands and arms that someone without a spinal cord injury can do: brush his teeth, feed himself, write his name, text his girlfriend, and even lift weights, which is an important part of his physical therapy.

Liu says Kris’s improvement “is very atypical in natural improvement or just rehabilitation alone. He had no improvement at all until he got the cells,” he says. He expects Kris will continue to improve.

Even more encouraging, says Kris’s father, “There’s sensation going on below his waist.” This is how his doctors realized recently that he had a bladder infection; Kris could feel it. Most people with spinal cord injuries of his kind wouldn’t be able to. Moreover, Rodney says, “The stem cells have given him back a lot of functions,” including breathing without a ventilator, coughing, and even sweating. Sweating, which most people take for granted (and don’t especially enjoy), is a process that most para- and quadriplegics can no longer do, as it requires the spinal cord to send signals to the sweat glands. This is another promising sign that Kris’s treatment has had a regenerative effect.

He has also had involuntary movement in his feet and some sensation returning in his knees and thighs. “The nurses noticed when you touch his legs that they’re warm,” Rodney says. “They told me that it’s unusual for people with his injury to have warm legs because they have such a problem regulating their body temperature.”

Rodney credits Liu for “moving heaven and Earth” to get Kris into the trial.

Liu is encouraged by Kris’s results and feels that the new “biological engineering” technologies emerging to treat spinal cord injuries— such as cell transplantation, new prosthetics, and brain wave interface processing—will come together to make huge strides “toward restoring function in either a conventional or unconventional way,” Liu says. “It’s really exciting.”

Kris was not up for an interview at this time, but in a statement provided by Keck Medicine, he said, “Just because you went through something bad doesn’t mean you have to suffer the rest of your life … now, thankfully with technology, we have some stuff that’s working, and it’s obviously worked for me so far.”

The initial results of this ongoing trial, which includes six patients at six sites across the United States, will be published sometime in September.

All images: Greg Iger/Keck Medicine of USC

 
It was almost closing time in the Leo Tolstoy House-Museum at Yasnaya Polyana, the Tolstoy family estate. I stood in the bedroom of my great-great-grandmother, Sophia Andreevna, Leo Tolstoy’s wife. I was named after Sophia, who was also known as Sonia. It was the last day of my weeklong stay at the estate. In the past 16 years, I had been in this room at least eight times. I had seen before the small paintings and black-and-white photographs of family members lining the walls; a talented amateur photographer in the early days of the medium, Sophia had taken them herself. Her dressing table gave the impression that it had just been organized, as if Sophia herself had recently sat there, perhaps before leaving on a trip. Small decorated jars, a handheld mirror, and a bristle hairbrush were lined up perfectly, and nearby, an open suitcase held hand-stitched fabric.

The sound of a Chopin duet echoed from the adjacent dining hall, or salon, where portraits of family ancestors hung on the walls and 20 descendants of the Tolstoys were gathered for a small, private concert. I went into the room to listen more closely. Chopin was one of Leo’s favorite composers, and is also one of mine. This salon was the heart of the family home for entertaining guests and where they often gathered to stage plays, play charades in costume, and make music together on the same grand piano being played today. Leo and Sonia loved to play four-handed pieces by Schumann and Brahms, among others. The whole family was very musical, several played the guitar, and of course all played the piano. In fact, Sergei Lvovich, Leo and Sonia’s oldest son, became a well-known musician and composer. They were especially fond of folk songs and gypsy singing, and Sonia’s sister Tanya—the prototype for Natasha Rostova in War and Peace—had a beautiful voice. She sang for family and guests regularly. In the corner stood a chess table where Leo enjoyed challenging his friends and family.

I had seen all this before, and yet it felt different this time. I was suddenly overtaken with feelings of warmth and intimacy that brought tears to my eyes. The house had always felt like a museum … but now, I felt a closeness. Perhaps it was the music. Or perhaps it was because I was in a family embrace.

Welcome to the Tolstoy Family Reunion.

 
I am one of Lev (Leo) Nikolaevitch Tolstoy’s great-great granddaughters. According to our family tree, I am number 196 of the nearly 400 direct descendants of Leo, almost 300 of whom are still alive. A small book about the museum-estate includes a list of Leo Tolstoy’s descendants, where Leo is number one, his eldest child Sergei Lvovich is number two, and so on. We are all catalogued under our generation ranging from children all of the way through great-great-great-great grandchildren. Over the years, revolutions and wars have spread us across the globe, and we now live in Brazil, Canada, Czech Republic, Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, Sweden, the U.S., Uruguay, and of course Russia, among other countries. Since 2000, biannual family reunions have been held at Yasnaya Polyana (located in the Tula region, about 124 miles south of Moscow), preserved as it had been when still a home at the time of Tolstoy’s death in 1910. The reunion was first organized by Vladimir Ilyich Tolstoy, then director of the Leo Tolstoy Museum-Estate Yasnaya Polyana and now cultural advisor to President Vladimir Putin. Like many others here, he is my cousin. The current director is Ekaterina Tolstaya, Vladimir’s wife. Vladimir envisioned the reunion as an opportunity to bring the descendants of Leo together, continuing the connectedness of family heritage the writer so honored.

This August, more than 90 family members and friends from 13 nations gathered at Yasnaya Polyana for a weeklong family reunion filled with activities, tours, and lively communal dinners, both celebrating old traditions and making new ones. At breakfast on the first day, I spotted Georg Tolstoy, an engineer from Sweden. I was overjoyed to see him again after 16 years. We greeted each other as old friends. Some descendants are in contact often; Georg and his fellow Swedes, for example, are the largest branch of the family, and they have a Tolstoy association that holds meetings. Others only see each other on Facebook, Instagram, or at the reunions.

We each trace our line back to one of six (out of 13) Tolstoy children who had children themselves. I am of the Mikhailovich line—Leo’s youngest son Michael was my great-grandfather. During the reunions we look for little numbers on our badges that indicate where we are in line from Leo. We find our names and faces on the huge family tree that fills up an entire wall of the museum’s hotel lobby. And we often play the genetics game: who has the Tolstoy eyes, smile, and walk—and hopefully not the Tolstoy nose, which was large and somewhat potato-shaped.

 
The Tolstoy family home is now the main museum on the property; it is surprisingly small and simple, and does not appear particularly grand or elegant. Rooms meander off each other. The walls are densely packed with photographs and pictures. The house would evolve often with the use changing depending on how many children were living there at any time. It is hard to imagine where all the many children slept when the family was in full assembly. After Tolstoy made some money publishing War and Peace, he built an addition, including the salon, which was more formal and had parquet floors, unlike the rest of the house. The kitchen is separate, located behind the main house adjacent to one of the many orchards. Next to the house, there is a beautiful flower and herb garden, which Sonia tended to herself.  

There are many other buildings on the estate, including the Volkonsky House, a more formal structure where Sonia’s sisters usually stayed. Today it holds offices and a reception center. Across the way, a rustic stable houses horses and a riding school. Nearby there are forests and meadows. We explore these grounds on foot, horseback, or bicycle. A small one-horse wagon was commandeered to drive the elderly relatives around.

These get-togethers are incredibly raucous events, filled with bellows and laughs across giant communal tables set up outside for al fresco dining. We come together as family to share stories over food and (lots of) wine. We sing birthday songs in five languages (in fact, we celebrated two during this last reunion). In the daytime, we practice flower weaving in the gardens, throw pots of “live” black clay and take Russian lessons. We play traditional games in the yard by the Yasnaya Polyana Cultural Center, including gorodki, a game similar to bowling or horseshoes that was a favorite pastime of Leo Tolstoy’s children. Of course soccer makes its way into activities almost every day. During the competitions, my team, The Lazy Sportsmen, lived up to the low expectations of our name, to the dismay of the more aggressive Caviar & Champagne team, which thought we didn’t put up much of a challenge.

 
But while the reunion is a bona fide good time, it’s also a lot more than that. “The first reunion literally turned my ‘consciousness upside down,’ as they say in Russian,” recalls Anastasia Tolstoy, Vladimir’s daughter. “Prior to then, I had known only a close circle of family and a few Tolstoys abroad. Everyone else was just a collection of names and numbers in the book detailing our family tree. In 2000, that tree was brought to life, and the colorfulness of the Tolstoy descendants was reawakened. We become a force to be reckoned with that goes beyond the renowned Russian writer, but back to centuries of illustrious ancestors with daring, history-making deeds.”

I do not have centuries of space here to describe those deeds, but to sum it up briefly: Historically, the Tolstoys have been known for their wild nature, intelligence, and creativity, with a very long legacy woven throughout Russian high society in politics, literature, and the fine arts. We can trace our lineage back to the original Tolstoy, a Lithuanian nobleman named Indris who came to Russia in the 1300s. The name “Tolstoy” actually translates to “The Fat One,” so I can only assume he had a little girth to him.

Lena Alekhina, press manager for the museum, says that the reunions are very important to the culture of Yasnaya Polyana because “the idea of a Russian estate is meaningless without the family. It is then just a place. Whereas here this estate can be what it is intended to be: a big house for a big family of many generations.”

The Museum-Estate stands on protected land and is open year-round, attracting more than 200,000 tourists and Tolstoy aficionados alike. It is host to an incredible panoply of cultural programs, including folklore workshops, locally developed crafts and Russian language classes for children and adults, a scholarship program for children in the arts, environmental protection assemblies, and conferences for writers from many countries. This educational focus is in tune with Leo’s life. He opened an informal school for the children in the area, taught by all his children. His daughter Alexandra also opened a formal school as part of the museum in the 1920s. Yasnaya Polyana, now with more than 400 employees, has expanded this dedication to learning, Russia’s people and the land, further bringing the Tolstoy spirit and philosophies to life.

Some tourists are excited by the family reunion, even asking for our autographs as we explore the grounds. It can be a little embarrassing: As my Tiotia (aunt) Masha says, “I didn’t write the books!”

 
Sure, you have been meaning to set aside a year (or more) to finally read War and Peace or oohed over the costumes in the 2012 version of Anna Karenina, but how much do you really know about the author who penned those tomes?

Count Lev Nikolaevitch Tolstoy is considered one of the greatest novelists of all time. He was prolific, writing many novels, plays, and essays (not to mention hundreds of letters) which continue to inspire worldwide. The many volumes of his journal alone, used to meticulously document every detail of his life—the good, bad, and the ugly—provided fodder for his work. He had theories on absolutely everything and let his opinion be vehemently known on religion (he believed in God but was excommunicated from the Russian Orthodox church in 1901 for his very liberal and protestant ideas), politics (he was not a fan of the monarchy and denounced his own noble standing), human rights (he corresponded with many activists around the globe, including Mahatma Ghandi and the American activist and reformer Jane Addams, who put up Leo’s daughter Alexandra in Chicago when she moved to the US in the late 1920s), and family (beginning with his own children).

Tolstoy was born on September 9, 1828 (or August 28 by the Julian calendar, which Russia discarded in 1918) on a comfortably worn leather couch that still resides in his study in the main house. A fertile seat, the couch welcomed all of his siblings, and Sonia had many of her children there too. And yet when asked exactly where on the property he was born, Tolstoy would take his guest into the garden and point about three meters up a tree, declaring, “Oh, right about there.”

 
He wasn’t lying. The house he was born in had once stood in that spot but had been carted away years before, leaving only the wings, which were adapted to become the house that stands there now. It was rumored that he had lost the very large formal house in a card game. Leo had been quite wild in his youth.

Yasnaya Polyana, which literally means “Bright Meadow,” was originally a 3700-acre estate belonging to Prince Nikolai Volkonsky, Leo’s maternal grandfather. It passed to Tolstoy in 1847, at which time he sold off the edge of the property, leaving a mere 1186 acres. He moved there in 1856, after finishing service in the army, and lived on the property for the remainder of his life. He also had a house in Moscow but preferred the open land and being among the peasants in the village surrounding Yasnaya. He loved the outdoors and enjoyed physical labor, working alongside the peasants in the fields. In their 48 years on the estate together, Leo and Sophia developed the natural contours of the parks with native flora to create beautiful spaces. They planted apple orchards with more than 60 varieties, evergreen forests, and flower gardens. The paths were deliberately designed to inspire creativity and allow thoughts to flow during their daily walks.

Every inch of land on Yasnaya Polyana is linked to meaning and a tale. Not far from the house, an orangerie—originally built by his parents—offered exotic fruit and a tropical haven during the bitter winters. Sonia loved the escape it provided, but Leo hated tending to this popular nobleman’s hobby (though he admitted it was meditative) and was not disappointed when it burned down.

For both Catarina Hjort Tolstoy, a PE teacher and painter from Sweden, and Kristina Johlige Tolstoy, a sculptor in Germany, their favorite Leo story is one known by the family as “The Green Stick,” which is closely tied to the land and Leo’s philosophy. When he was a boy, Leo’s older brother Nicholas told him that the secret to healing the world’s ills was carved on a green stick, which would only be revealed when one joined the “Brotherhood of the Ants.” Nicholas said the stick was buried on the estate at the edge of the Zakaz Forest. The Green Stick became a symbol of his lifelong search for love and peace. In the end, he was laid to rest at the supposed location of the mythical stick, thus having the secrets of goodness and peace revealed to him, in a manner of speaking.

Tolstoy’s interests were voracious and spanned hundreds of topics. At Yasnaya Polyana, he entertained many musicians, writers, and artists from around the world, including Maxim Gorky, Anton Chekhov, Ivan Turgenev, and the composer A.G. Rubenstein. He spent days on end sitting for portraits by well-known artists like Ilya Repin. He corresponded with the likes of George Bernard Shaw and Thomas Edison, who gifted him a phonograph, on which the family recorded Leo’s voice. Visitors and pilgrims flocked to Yasnaya Polyana, with many staying for months, much to the irritation of Sonia. Photographs, letters, and trinkets from his evolving interests and tastes fill the study in the house. But most impressive is the library that is a big part of the entire house. It contains nearly 10,500 titles in about 27 languages. Tolstoy spoke German and French fluently, and eventually taught himself 13 languages, including English, Hebrew, Tartar, Arabic, and ancient Greek; he wanted to be able to read texts in their original languages. Many of the books are dog-eared with his personal notes and thoughts scribbled in the margins.

 
While living at Yasnaya Polyana, Sonia carefully documented every single belonging in the house, down to even the smallest items in the drawers and under the bed. She knew the estate had an important destiny. During the reunions, my cousin Fekla Tolstaya, a broadcast host/producer and journalist in Russia, has entertained children by asking them to crawl under the beds and see what they can find there. My grandfather, Vladimir Mikhailovich Tolstoy, remembers staying in a room with many arches that was once used as a meat pantry. Huge hams had hung from the arches on hooks. My grandfather and his brothers would climb up to the ceiling, attach ropes to the hooks, and swing across the room, shouting, “I’m a ham, I’m a ham!”

Truly amazing is that the museum has been sustained in such a remarkable condition over time. In fact, during World War II the Nazis occupied the house for 45 days. They trashed it and set it on fire on their way out. Miraculously, villagers saw the plumes of smoke and rescued the home. And all of those belongings Sophia so painstakingly documented? Before the Germans arrived, they had been evacuated to Tomsk in Siberia to wait out the war. They were eventually brought back to the estate to help restore it to its former glory.

I asked Grégoire Tolstoï, an event producer from Belgium, his perception of the gathering. A fellow member of Team Lazy Sportsmen, Grégoire and I had spent a lot of the reunion not winning races together. A first-time attendee, Grégoire harkens from an older branch of the Tolstoy family. The Leo Tolstoys are a large clan, but the legacy is 700 years deep and much larger than Leo. “I was stunned by the fact that many have an artistic passion or occupation, which was emphasized in my immediate family,” Tolstoï told me. “But I see it is more of a characteristic. What a wonderful surprise.”

I had a similar insight about the Tolstoys. It is striking that for hundreds of years we share the same occupations from generation to generation, in the fine arts, music, human rights, politics, international affairs, and of course literature. It is amazing to see how many people are walking in these footsteps: visual artists and actors, politicians, philanthropists and peacemakers, journalists and writers, television personalities and linguists. In speaking to reunion attendees, I find that their excitement about the boisterous event is always underscored by a deeper connection to each other and our common ancestors.

 
“The first time I came to Yasnaya Polyana, I collected daisies and intended to make a piece with them,” Kristina, the sculptor, shared with me in the meadow by the stables. “It was there that I learned that Sophia created artwork out of pressed flowers and plants. Learning this and reading her diaries, I felt so much more connected to her. In honor of this discovery, I dedicated a work to her titled ‘Seeing More’.”

My mother, Tanya Tolstoy Penkrat, says that she was overwhelmed when she saw Sophia’s small paintings of mushrooms hanging in her bedroom. Collecting mushrooms has been an abiding hobby of my mother’s, and she too likes to paint little pictures of mushrooms as gifts for friends and relatives.

 
Life for Leo Tolstoy did not end in 1910 with his death from pneumonia. Many of his children remained committed to the family heritage, including writing several books about their extraordinary lives, such as Tolstoy, A Life of My Father, by Alexandra Tolstaya. Alexandra, the youngest daughter, also helped convert Yasnaya Polyana into the museum, which opened on June 10, 1921. When Stalin’s oppression paralyzed her work, she moved to the United States in 1929, eventually starting the Tolstoy Foundation, which sponsored thousands of Russian refugees to come to America during and after World War II, including Vladimir Nabokov, Sergei Rachmaninoff, and my mother.

Today, some of Tolstoy’s descendants are inspired by his ideas to move Russia in a new direction. “One of the first conditions of happiness is that the link between Man and Nature shall not be broken,” Leo wrote. In this spirit, Daniil Tolstoy, a great-grandson of Leo, is starting the first organic farm in Russia, just outside of Yasnaya Polyana. Called “Nasledie Tolstogo” (Наследие Толстого, or Tolstoy’s Heritage), the concept originated during a previous family reunion when Daniil visited Nikolskoye-Vyazemskoye, a country estate that belonged to Tolstoy’s great-grandfather. There he found gorgeous fields filled with rich black soil laying fallow. He anticipates beginning to plant this spring using new technology and techniques for sustainable farming. He hopes to develop products under a unique brand and eventually establish an organic agriculture school on the property to educate young Russians about sustainable farming.

 
Others are committed to both maintaining and modernizing Leo’s legacy. Fekla Tolstaya, a great-great granddaughter of his, has been extraordinarily active in bringing Leo Tolstoy into the 21st century. Tolstaya told The Guardian that at the end of his life Tolstoy did not want money for his work, but instead wanted to give his work to the public: “It was important for us to make it free for all people across the world. It is his will.” Among these initiatives is All of Tolstoy in One Click, an effort to digitize the entire 90-plus volume collection of Tolstoy’s writings, making them available on e-readers, iPads, and smartphones. This effort required massive crowdsourcing. In 2013, thousands of volunteers from 49 countries answered the call to arms to proofread 46,800 pages of already scanned works. They completed the project in just 14 days.

In December 2015, Fekla organized a four-day marathon reading of all four volumes of War and Peace, which Tolstoy wrote at Yasnaya Polyana and published in 1869. Some 1300 readers from 30 cities around the world took part, including actors, sports stars, politicians, and even cosmonaut Sergei Volkov, who read from the International Space Station. The event was live-streamed online and broadcast live on Russian TV.

Next, Fekla plans to collaborate with several academic institutions, including Moscow State University and Harvard University, to create the “Tolstoy Digital Universe.” This online encyclopedia of the writer’s literary heritage will allow users to have, right at their fingertips, access to Tolstoy’s texts, quotes, correspondence, etc. In addition, she hopes to digitize the more than 5000 manuscript pages of War and Peace, giving us a behind-the-cover look at the incredible development of this literary masterpiece.

 
When the Chopin concert was over, I exited the house with my cousins. We gathered in the yard for a family picture, just as Leo and Sonia did quite often with their children. I adore looking at photos of them enjoying afternoon tea in the garden and pointing out my great-grandfather among the siblings. I think Sonia would have enjoyed these family reunions for their liveliness and feelings of love and closeness. As for me, I am newly inspired to delve further into my family history and eventually write that book that I’ve been planning for ages.

Special thanks to my mother, Tanya Tolstoy Penkrat, who is the most incredible oral historian and keeper of stories for many of our extended family.

Unless otherwise noted, all images are courtesy of the author and her relatives.

NASA’s asteroid sample retrieval spacecraft is ready for launch. OSIRIS-REx is an ambitious mission to the asteroid Bennu, a mountain-sized “near-Earth object” that scientists believe holds the secrets of the solar system’s origins. Today, September 8, at 7:05 p.m. EDT (weather permitting), it will launch into space and begin a two-year journey to Bennu. The mission team will eventually choose the most scientifically interesting spot on the asteroid and direct the spacecraft to make contact and take a physical sample. It will return to Earth in 2023 and eject the sample capsule, which will parachute down to Utah’s west desert.

The science objectives of OSIRIS-REx are right there in its name: Spelled out, it is the Origins Spectral Interpretation Resource Identification Security-Regolith Explorer. The vehicle carries a payload of five scientific instruments and a sample collection arm called the Touch-and-Go Sample Acquisition Mechanism (TAGSAM) to help it accomplish each of the key words or phrases in its name. Each instrument and its purpose is explained below.

1. ORIGINS: BRINGING A TIME CAPSULE FROM THE BIRTH OF THE SOLAR SYSTEM BACK TO EARTH

“This is really what drives our program,” Dante Lauretta, the principal investigator of the mission, said on Tuesday, September 6 at a press conference held at Cape Canaveral, where OSIRIS-REx will launch from. “We’re going to asteroid Bennu because it is a time capsule from the earliest stages of solar system formation, back when our planetary system was spread across as dust grains in a swirling cloud around our growing proto-star.” Bodies accumulated in the cloud, many getting water ice and organic material—key compounds that led to the habitability of Earth and the origin of life. Bennu is one such body. By taking a hopefully carbon-rich sample of the asteroid and bringing it home, planetary scientists will be able to study in a laboratory setting a pristine cache of the building blocks of Earth.

Lauretta describes sample return as being the forefront of planetary exploration. If Bennu is a time traveler from the distant past, sample return is time travel to the distant future. As new laboratory techniques and technologies are developed, they can be applied to the samples. Scientists today will be able to study the samples at the parts-per-million level. Fifty years from now? Who knows what technology will have been developed. To appreciate how massive an advance might be in store, consider that 50 years ago, computers were only just being introduced to the field of geology. Now we can study the composition of many bodies in the solar system.

2. SPECTRAL INTERPRETATION: ANALYZING BENNU’S COMPOSITION

Since Bennu’s discovery in 1999, scientists have used the best telescopes on Earth and in space to study the asteroid. As such, they have an extraordinary data set from which to work, and believe they have a pretty good handle on the asteroid’s composition. The spacecraft, up close and personal with the asteroid, will use its spectrometers and cameras to provide “ground truth” to the distant observations of telescopes. Scientists will be able to see how well their predictions matched reality. What they got correct will have confirmation; what they got wrong can be used to refine their models. All of this can then be applied to thousands of other objects in the solar system.

3. RESOURCE IDENTIFICATION: EYEING FUTURE MINING OPERATIONS

Lauretta tells mental_floss that when OSIRIS-REx was first conceived, resource identification was “cool science fiction.” The idea of going to asteroids and mining them for material was the sort of thing people in some Jetsons-like future would be able to do, but not us. Today, however, companies are lining up for the chance to begin celestial mining operations. OSIRIS-REx will be pioneering the technologies and capabilities necessary to provide detailed global analysis of an asteroid’s surface. They will be able to focus on composition and mineralogy with an eye toward identifying regions of interest. It will be, in other words, creating the sorts of prospecting maps once seen in the Old West—only this time for an off-world ore-rush.

4. SECURITY: STUDYING BENNU’S TRAJECTORY TO AVOID POTENTIAL ASTEROID COLLISIONS

Earth’s orbit around the Sun is startlingly perilous. Bennu, to name only one near-Earth object, has small-but-not-small-enough chance of colliding with this planet in the 22nd century. (The odds are 1 in 2700, which is about the same as your odds of dying by exposure to smoke or fire. That’s a pretty terrifying figure when you consider the destruction and damage that such an asteroid impact might cause, and that people die in house fires all the time.)

Scientists will use the data returned from OSIRIS-REx to study something called the Yarkovsky Effect. As asteroids go about their orbit, they absorb energy from the Sun and emit that energy as heat. That emission essentially acts as a small, natural asteroid thruster, and changes an asteroid’s trajectory over time. In the seven years that scientists have known about the existence of Bennu, the Yarkovsky Effect alone has changed the asteroid’s position by about 100 miles. If they can get a grip on the phenomenon and its causes and effects, they can apply it not only to Bennu but also to thousands of objects throughout the solar system. If something bad is coming, we can know about it—and perhaps find a way to stop it.

5.REGOLITH EXPLORER: UNDERSTANDING HOW SURFACE PARTICLES BEHAVE IN MICROGRAVITY

Regolith is the blanket of dust and gravel on the surface of many celestial bodies. Scientists don’t quite understand random mechanics in a microgravity environment. Even if Bennu’s sample collection arm was unsuccessful, “By the act of putting our [Touch-And-Go Sample Acquisition Mechanism] device on the surface of the asteroid to collect the sample, in and of itself we are performing a fantastic science experiment,” says Lauretta.

The science begins in 2018. The journey begins today.

Many words in the English language that seem remarkably common have a surprising secondary definition known mostly to scientists in different disciplines. Here are 18 words drawn from the American Heritage Science Dictionary that have an alternative meaning in various science disciplines. Some may be familiar, and others less so. 

1. ALIEN 

Used in: Ecology

This refers not only the drooling nightmare that terrified Sigourney Weaver but also to non-native creatures and plant species introduced to an area from which they don’t originate. 

2. ALUM

Used in: Chemistry 

When you’ve graduated from an institution of learning, you become an alumni or “alum,” but the word is also the name of any various crystalline double salts of a trivalent metal (such as aluminum, chromium, or iron) or a monovalent metal (such as potassium or sodium). It’s used in industry to harden and purify, and in medicine as an emetic (aka vomit inducer), and to stop bleeding.

3. BELT

Used in: Geography, Astronomy

You may keep your pants up with one of these, but geographers and geologists are more likely thinking of a geographic region that is in some way distinctive from others. Space scientists use this one too (see: Kuiper asteroid belt). 

4. CALCULUS 

Used in: Medicine

You may have struggled with this branch of mathematics in school, but a doctor will be more concerned with the kind that is a solid mass, usually inorganic material, that forms in a cavity or tissue of the body. Such a calculus is often found in the gall bladder, kidney or urinary bladder—otherwise known as a stone.

5. DEPOSITION

Used in: Geology

If you’re involved in a lawsuit, you may have to submit to a deposition, where a legal team asks you questions before you go to trial. For geologists, however, this refers to an accumulation of matter by natural processes, such as sediment in a river or mineral deposits in a bodily organ.

6. FAMILY 

Used in: Biology

You probably grew up in a human one and may be raising one of your own. Taxonomists use the term to mean a group of organisms ranking above a genus and below an order. Family names of plants, fungi, and algae have the suffix -aceae, while animal family names end with –idae. 

7. GALL 

Used in: Botany

It takes a lot of gall to assume there’s only one meaning to this word, which is actually an abnormal swelling of plant tissue, usually caused by injury or parasite infection. They can appear as balls, knobs, lumps, or warts. 

8. INSULT 

Used in: Medicine

A verbal attack can feel like an insult, but this term is also used for certain assaults and injuries to the body, from a bruise to a tumor. It can be the cause of such an injury as well. 

9. LISP 

Used in: Programming

Though commonly used to refer to a speech impediment, this is also an acronym for list processing, a programming language for artificial intelligence programming designed in 1959 by John McCarthy. It’s also one of the oldest programming languages still in use today.

10. MOLE

Used in: Chemistry

You may know this as an annoying little creature that digs holes in your garden (or a spy within an organization), but to chemists it’s a standard scientific unit for measuring large quantities of tiny molecules or particles. 

11. NO 

Used in: Chemistry

The word of choice for negating something is also the abbreviation for the element Nobelium, a synthetic radioactive metallic element produced by bombarding curium with carbon ions. Named after Alfred Nobel, it’s radioactive. 

12. OHM 

Used in: Physics

Not to be confused with the Sanskrit word often exercised in yoga classes, an ohm is equal to the resistance of a conductor channeling one ampere of flow when a volt is applied to it.

13. PATCH

Used in: Engineering, Programming 

A torn pair of jeans might require one of these, but it’s also a temporary, removable electronic connection between two components in a communications system, as well as a piece of code that fixes a software bug.

14. RAD

Used in: Physics 

This was the equivalent of “cool” (derived from “radical”) in the 1980s, but to physicists, it’s a unit of measuring the energy absorbed by a material that has been exposed to radiation. One rad equals 100 ergs per gram of material.

15. SHEAR 

Used in: Physics

Though you can apply this to sheep to remove them of their wool, it also refers to a force applied to an object at a perpendicular angle, putting greater stress on one side of the axis than the other, as can happen in earthquakes and explosions. 

16. TAG

Used in: Programming 

Other than the game where one of you is “it” and chases down the others, this is also a term referring to a sequence of characters in a markup language to provide information for formatting specifications about a document. If you use a Mac, you might be familiar with these kinds of tags. 

17. UNION

Used in: Mathematics 

You might have to pay dues to one of these at work, but it’s also a numerical set whose members belong to at least one of a group of two or more sets. You’ve likely seen a union in a Venn diagram. 

18. VITRIOL

Used in: Chemistry 

It might make sense that this word, often used to mean cruel or bitter criticism, is how sulfuric acid used to be known. Discovered in the 8th century by an Arab alchemist, vitriol comes from the Latin for “glass,” after its sulfate salts.