Driving in a busy city, you have to get good at scrutinizing the body language of pedestrians. Your foot hovers somewhere between the gas and the brake, waiting for your brain to triangulate their intent: Is that one trying to cross the street, or just waiting for the bus? Still, a whole lot of the time you hit the brakes for nothing, ending up in a kind of dance with the pedestrian (you go, no you go, no YOU go).

If you think that’s frustrating, then you’ve never been a self-driving car. As human drivers slowly go extinct (and human pedestrians don’t), autonomous vehicles will have to get better at decoding those unspoken intersection interactions. So a startup called Perceptive Automata is tackling that looming problem. The company says its computer vision system can scrutinize a pedestrian to determine not only their awareness of an oncoming car, but their intent—that is, using body language to predict behavior.

Typically if you want a machine to recognize something like trees, you first have humans label tens of thousands of pictures: trees or not trees. It’s a nice, neat binary. It gives the machine learning algorithms a base level of knowledge. But detecting human body language is more complex.

“In the case of a pedestrian, it's not, this person is crossing the road and this person isn't crossing the road. It's, this person isn't crossing the road but they clearly want to,” says Sam Anthony, co-founder of Perceptive Automata. Is the person looking down the road at oncoming traffic? If they’ve got grocery bags, have they set them down to wait, or are they mid-hoist, getting ready to cross?

Perceptive trains its models to look at those kinds of behaviors. They begin with human trainers, who watch and analyze videos of different pedestrians. Perceptive will take a clip of, say, a human looking down the street to cross the road, and manipulate it hundreds of ways—obscuring portions of it, for instance. Maybe sometimes the head is easier to see, maybe sometimes it’s harder. Then they depart from the tree-not-tree binary by asking the trainers a range of questions, such as, "Is that pedestrian hoping to eventually cross the street?" or “If you were that cyclist, would you be trying to stop the car from passing?”

When different parts of the image are harder to see, the human trainers have to think harder about their judgements of body language, which Perceptive can measure by tracking eye movement and hesitation. Maybe the head is harder to make out, for example, and the trainer has to put more thought into it. “This tells us that there's information about the appearance of the person's head in this particular slice that's an important part of how people judge whether that person in that training video is going to cross the street,” Anthony says.

The head is clearly an important clue for human observers, so it’s also an important clue for the machines. “So when the model saw a novel image where the head was important,” Anthony says, “it would be primed based on the training data to believe that people would likely really care about the pixels around the head area, and would produce an output that captured that human intuition.”

By considering cues like where the pedestrian is looking, Perceptive can quantify awareness and intent. A person walking down the sidewalk with their back to the car, for example, isn’t anything to worry about—both unaware and not intending to cross the street. But someone standing at a crosswalk peering down the street is another story. This insight would give a self-driving car extra time to slow down in case the pedestrian does decide to make a run for it.

Perceptive says it’s already working with automakers—it won’t reveal which—to deploy the system, and plans to license the technology to the makers of self-driving cars. (Daimler, for its part, has also studied tracking pedestrian head movements.) It’s also interested in other robotics companies producing machines that will need to interact closely with humans.

Because in this strange new world of complex interactions between people and robots, it’s as much about machines adapting to humans as it is humans adapting to machines. Determining the intent of pedestrians will help, but it won’t be easy. “Knowing the intent of pedestrians would certainly make [autonomous vehicle] deployment safer,” says Carnegie Mellon roboticist Raj Rajkumar, who works in self-driving cars. “It is, however, a very difficult problem to solve perfectly.”

“Consider Manhattan,” Rajkumar adds. And consider a big group of people crossing, specifically a person on the far side of a group from a robocar. “Among this group, one person is either short or starts running to cross quickly after the vehicle has decided to make a turn. Machine vision is not perfect.” And machine vision can get confused by optics, just like humans can. Reflections, the sun dropping low on the horizon, alternating light and dark patches on the road, not to mention heavy rain or snow, all can bamboozle the machines.

Then there’s the simple matter of people just acting weird. Perceptive’s system can pick up on tell-tale cues, but humans aren’t always so consistent. “There were about 7,000 pedestrian fatalities in the US in 2017 alone,” says Rajkumar. “The primary issue is the presence of significant uncertainty and sudden decisions that get made. Most pedestrians are very traffic-conscious most of the time. But, occasionally, a pedestrian is either in a hurry or changes their mind at the last moment and starts crossing the street, or even reverses direction.”

No one’s about to claim that self-driving cars will totally eliminate traffic deaths—not even machines are perfect, and there’s always going to be the unpredictable human pedestrian element. But bit by bit, robocars are getting better at navigating both our world and our vagaries.

Information from space has historically been the province of the rich and powerful. Big Earth-observing satellites can cost hundreds of millions of dollars to build and launch, and the price of their data scales accordingly. Scrappy scientific upstarts have, for a while, been building smallsats to get orbital data on the cheap. And while a single smallsat won't give a small company or nation-state all-seeing powers, if you put a bunch of them together to form a constellation, you can get rapidly refreshed information on the planet.

Now, those commercial constellations are powerful and numerous enough that the feds are taking an interest, with both NASA and NOAA currently navigating pilot data-purchase programs. Neither organization is looking to outsource all its observations: Both agencies fly their own substantial satellites, and NASA sometimes makes its own little ones. But since capable constellations of smallsats are beaming down data about the planet—all of it for sale—why wouldn't federal science agencies take advantage of the abundance?

The National Geospatial Intelligence Agency has already seen the value in that, and signed data-subscription contracts with Earth-imaging startup Planet. And it has long bought high-resolution data from giants like DigitalGlobe, as has NASA. There's a reason, though, that science agencies haven't fully bought into the hype yet: Commercial smallsat companies can be capricious. They may come and go, or their data may change in quality or format, or not be up to snuff.

NOAA—responsible for things like daily weather forecasts, storm warnings, and long-term climate monitoring—operates its own fleet of 17 larger satellites, with some in the flagship GOES series valued around $500 million each. The agency isn't interested in replacing all its innate assets, or their data, with commercial smallsat stuff. But it is interested in augmentation. And so, as part of its Commercial Weather Data Pilot Program, the agency issued two contracts to smallsat companies Spire and GeoOptics in 2016. In exchange for just over $1 million, they were to provide NOAA with atmospheric data—not necessarily so NOAA could learn about the atmosphere, but so it could learn about the data's "potential value to NOAA’s weather forecasts and warnings."

The program kind of halfway worked. By the time the performance period concluded, in April 2017, only Spire had anything to show for itself. Its small satellites had spied on GPS signals, using a method called radio occultation to detect slight changes as the signals streamed through the atmosphere—revealing information about temperature or moisture in the area.

GeoOptics didn’t actually launch any satellites until July 2017. Which is several months after the April deadline.

NOAA had been planning to announce round two of the pilot program in 2017, but in September, the agency determined that that was “not in the best interests” of the government, or the program, and anticipated delaying till later in 2018.

NOAA officials aren't unconcerned with the risks commercial smallsat data poses, a position they expressed, as reported by SpaceNews, at the American Meteorological Society Meeting in January. Officials don't know, for instance, whether a given smallsat constellation will remain afloat, and whether its weather data will stay a similar price.

It makes sense that NOAA in particular—keeper of the National Weather Service—would be cautious about launching into private smallsats. “For the longest time [weather] has been completely handled by the government side of things,” says Dallas Kasaboski, an analyst at consulting firm Northern Sky Research. Meteorology needs data solid enough to pin predictions to, and sometimes it feels the only way to get a job done right is to do it yourself.

And the reason government agencies are interested in smallsats is also their cause for concern. There's money and innovation, and tons of data to be digested. But it also means companies are still newish; they're switching up hard- and software and merging and buying and being bought. All of that shifting makes it harder for agencies like NOAA to quality-assure data. “The Earth observation space is very competitive,” says Kasaboski. “It’s changing. Companies are changing hands or consolidating. There is often that kind of a threat.”

For instance: Google acquired an Earth-observation company called Skybox, which then became Terra Bella, which was then bought by unicorn Planet, which sells data back to Google, which also buys data from DigitalGlobe, which is, as of recently, owned by the same company that also owns SSL, which has built satellites for Planet in the model of Terra Bella.

Despite the downsides, other agencies can throw themselves into commerciality with more abandon, because their responsibilities aren’t the same. Take that space agency, for example, whose mission is more simply scientific.

In December 2017, NASA asked Earth-observation companies that are already flying smallsat constellations for their deets: Instead of dictating exactly what it wanted, NASA also asked them what they could give. “We are letting them kind of drive that show,” says Sandra Cauffman, deputy director of NASA’s earth science division. Later that month, the agency had gotten 11 responses (just a year and a half ago, in a similar call, they got only five).

Although NASA can’t say which companies threw their sats into the ring, Cauffman says the agency hopes to have contracts in place with some of them in March, for a one-year pilot project.

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There’s mostly only upside here: If that data is good enough, NASA can augment its homebuilt capabilities without having to construct, launch, and maintain its own constellations. There is a catch, though. “NASA has a free and open data policy,” says Cauffman. NOAA does too, which is why you can get any GOES images you want, any time you want (except when the government is shut down).

Companies, of course, may not be so happy about free access. After all, if NASA buys their proprietary data and then gives it away, no one else really needs to press purchase. “How much is it going to cost if we would like to distribute the data more broadly?” says Cauffman.

The other questions, of course, are about how good the data is, and how reliably it’s delivered—same as NOAA would like to know.

Both agencies are approaching the smallsat industry with varying degrees of question and caution. But this business direction—away from providing everything for themselves and toward paying for someone to provide for them—is the natural order of space things. The Obama administration made big strides toward outsourcing things like space launches, with the Trump administration following in step. And while the smallsat industry is less developed than the rocket industry, a little push, courtesy of Big Brother, could help the industry mature faster. Because the government is a big customer, but a tough one.

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The tiny tadpole embryo looked like a bean. One day old, it didn’t even have a heart yet. The researcher in a white coat and gloves who hovered over it made a precise surgical incision where its head would form. Moments later, the brain was gone, but the embryo was still alive.

The brief procedure took Celia Herrera-Rincon, a neuroscience postdoc at the Allen Discovery Center at Tufts University, back to the country house in Spain where she had grown up, in the mountains near Madrid. When she was 11 years old, while walking her dogs in the woods, she found a snake, Vipera latastei. It was beautiful but dead. “I realized I wanted to see what was inside the head,” she recalled. She performed her first “lab test” using kitchen knives and tweezers, and she has been fascinated by the many shapes and evolutionary morphologies of the brain ever since. Her collection now holds about 1,000 brains from all kinds of creatures.

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Original story reprinted with permission from Quanta Magazine, an editorially independent publication of the Simons Foundation whose mission is to enhance public understanding of science by covering research developments and trends in mathematics and the physical and life sciences.

This time, however, she was not interested in the brain itself, but in how an African clawed frog would develop without one. She and her supervisor, Michael Levin, a software engineer turned developmental biologist, are investigating whether the brain and nervous system play a crucial role in laying out the patterns that dictate the shapes and identities of emerging organs, limbs and other structures.

For the past 65 years, the focus of developmental biology has been on DNA as the carrier of biological information. Researchers have typically assumed that genetic expression patterns alone are enough to determine embryonic development.

To Levin, however, that explanation is unsatisfying. “Where does shape come from? What makes an elephant different from a snake?” he asked. DNA can make proteins inside cells, he said, but “there is nothing in the genome that directly specifies anatomy.” To develop properly, he maintains, tissues need spatial cues that must come from other sources in the embryo. At least some of that guidance, he and his team believe, is electrical.

In recent years, by working on tadpoles and other simple creatures, Levin’s laboratory has amassed evidence that the embryo is molded by bioelectrical signals, particularly ones that emanate from the young brain long before it is even a functional organ. Those results, if replicated in other organisms, may change our understanding of the roles of electrical phenomena and the nervous system in development, and perhaps more widely in biology.

“Levin’s findings will shake some rigid orthodoxy in the field,” said Sui Huang, a molecular biologist at the Institute for Systems Biology. If Levin’s work holds up, Huang continued, “I think many developmental biologists will be stunned to see that the construction of the body plan is not due to local regulation of cells … but is centrally orchestrated by the brain.”

Bioelectrical Influences in Development

The Spanish neuroscientist and Nobel laureate Santiago Ramón y Cajal once called the brain and neurons, the electrically active cells that process and transmit nerve signals, the “butterflies of the soul.” The brain is a center for information processing, memory, decision making and behavior, and electricity figures into its performance of all of those activities.

But it’s not just the brain that uses bioelectric signaling—the whole body does. All cell membranes have embedded ion channels, protein pores that act as pathways for charged molecules, or ions. Differences between the number of ions inside and outside a cell result in an electric gradient—the cell’s resting potential. Vary this potential by opening or blocking the ion channels, and you change the signals transmitted to, from and among the cells all around. Neurons do this as well, but even faster: To communicate among themselves, they use molecules called neurotransmitters that are released at synapses in response to voltage spikes, and they send ultra-rapid electrical pulses over long distances along their axons, encoding information in the pulses’ pattern, to control muscle activity.

Levin has thought about hacking networks of neurons since the mid-1980s, when he was a high school student in the suburbs near Boston, writing software for pocket money. One day, while browsing a small bookstore in Vancouver at Expo 86 with his father, he spotted a volume called The Body Electric, by Robert O. Becker and Gary Selden. He learned that scientists had been investigating bioelectricity for centuries, ever since Luigi Galvani discovered in the 1780s that nerves are animated by what he called “animal electricity.”

However, as Levin continued to read up on the subject, he realized that, even though the brain uses electricity for information processing, no one seemed to be seriously investigating the role of bioelectricity in carrying information about a body’s development. Wouldn’t it be cool, he thought, if we could comprehend “how the tissues process information and what tissues were ‘thinking about’ before they evolved nervous systems and brains?”

He started digging deeper and ended up getting a biology doctorate at Harvard University in morphogenesis—the study of the development of shapes in living things. He worked in the tradition of scientists like Emil du Bois-Reymond, a 19th-century German physician who discovered the action potential of nerves. In the 1930s and ’40s, the American biologists Harold Burr and Elmer Lund measured electric properties of various organisms during their embryonic development and studied connections between bioelectricity and the shapes animals take. They were not able to prove a link, but they were moving in the right direction, Levin said.

Before Genes Reigned Supreme

The work of Burr and Lund occurred during a time of widespread interest in embryology. Even the English mathematician Alan Turing, famed for cracking the Enigma code, was fascinated by embryology. In 1952 he published a paper suggesting that body patterns like pigmented spots and zebra stripes arise from the chemical reactions of diffusing substances, which he called morphogens.

Masayuki Yamashita

But organic explanations like morphogens and bioelectricity didn’t stay in the limelight for long. In 1953, James Watson and Francis Crick published the double helical structure of DNA, and in the decades since “the focus of developmental biology has been on DNA as the carrier of biological information, with cells thought to follow their own internal genetic programs, prompted by cues from their local environment and neighboring cells,” Huang said.

The rationale, according to Richard Nuccitelli, chief science officer at Pulse Biosciences and a former professor of molecular biology at the University of California, Davis, was that “since DNA is what is inherited, information stored in the genes must specify all that is needed to develop.” Tissues are told how to develop at the local level by neighboring tissues, it was thought, and each region patterns itself from information in the genomes of its cells.

The extreme form of this view is “to explain everything by saying ‘it is in the genes,’ or DNA, and this trend has been reinforced by the increasingly powerful and affordable DNA sequencing technologies,” Huang said. “But we need to zoom out: Before molecular biology imposed our myopic tunnel vision, biologists were much more open to organism-level principles.”

The tide now seems to be turning, according to Herrera-Rincon and others. “It’s too simplistic to consider the genome as the only source of biological information,” she said. Researchers continue to study morphogens as a source of developmental information in the nervous system, for example. Last November, Levin and Chris Fields, an independent scientist who works in the area where biology, physics and computing overlap, published a paper arguing that cells’ cytoplasm, cytoskeleton and both internal and external membranes also encode important patterning data—and serve as systems of inheritance alongside DNA.

And, crucially, bioelectricity has made a comeback as well. In the 1980s and ’90s, Nuccitelli, along with the late Lionel Jaffe at the Marine Biological Laboratory, Colin McCaig at the University of Aberdeen, and others, used applied electric fields to show that many cells are sensitive to bioelectric signals and that electricity can induce limb regeneration in nonregenerative species.

According to Masayuki Yamashita of the International University of Health and Welfare in Japan, many researchers forget that every living cell, not just neurons, generates electric potentials across the cell membrane. “This electrical signal works as an environmental cue for intercellular communication, orchestrating cell behaviors during morphogenesis and regeneration,” he said.

However, no one was really sure why or how this bioelectric signaling worked, said Levin, and most still believe that the flow of information is very local. “Applied electricity in earlier experiments directly interacts with something in cells, triggering their responses,” he said. But what it was interacting with and how the responses were triggered were mysteries.

That’s what led Levin and his colleagues to start tinkering with the resting potential of cells. By changing the voltage of cells in flatworms, over the last few years they produced worms with two heads, or with tails in unexpected places. In tadpoles, they reprogrammed the identity of large groups of cells at the level of entire organs, making frogs with extra legs and changing gut tissue into eyes—simply by hacking the local bioelectric activity that provides patterning information.

And because the brain and nervous system are so conspicuously active electrically, the researchers also began to probe their involvement in long-distance patterns of bioelectric information affecting development. In 2015, Levin, his postdoc Vaibhav Pai, and other collaborators showed experimentally that bioelectric signals from the body shape the development and patterning of the brain in its earliest stages. By changing the resting potential in the cells of tadpoles as far from the head as the gut, they appeared to disrupt the body’s “blueprint” for brain development. The resulting tadpoles’ brains were smaller or even nonexistent, and brain tissue grew where it shouldn’t.

Unlike previous experiments with applied electricity that simply provided directional cues to cells, “in our work, we know what we have modified—resting potential—and we know how it triggers responses: by changing how small signaling molecules enter and leave cells,” Levin said. The right electrical potential lets neurotransmitters go in and out of voltage-powered gates (transporters) in the membrane. Once in, they can trigger specific receptors and initiate further cellular activity, allowing researchers to reprogram identity at the level of entire organs.

This work also showed that bioelectricity works over long distances, mediated by the neurotransmitter serotonin, Levin said. (Later experiments implicated the neurotransmitter butyrate as well.) The researchers started by altering the voltage of cells near the brain, but then they went farther and farther out, “because our data from the prior papers showed that tumors could be controlled by electric properties of cells very far away,” he said. “We showed that cells at a distance mattered for brain development too.”

Then Levin and his colleagues decided to flip the experiment. Might the brain hold, if not an entire blueprint, then at least some patterning information for the rest of the body, Levin asked—and if so, might the nervous system disseminate this information bioelectrically during the earliest stages of a body’s development? He invited Herrera-Rincon to get her scalpel ready.

Making Up for a Missing Brain

Herrera-Rincon’s brainless Xenopus laevis tadpoles grew, but within just a few days they all developed highly characteristic defects—and not just near the brain, but as far away as the very end of their tails. Their muscle fibers were also shorter and their nervous systems, especially the peripheral nerves, were growing chaotically. It’s not surprising that nervous system abnormalities that impair movement can affect a developing body. But according to Levin, the changes seen in their experiment showed that the brain helps to shape the body’s development well before the nervous system is even fully developed, and long before any movement starts.

That such defects could be seen so early in the development of the tadpoles was intriguing, said Gil Carvalho, a neuroscientist at the University of Southern California. “An intense dialogue between the nervous system and the body is something we see very prominently post-development, of course,” he said. Yet the new data “show that this cross-talk starts from the very beginning. It’s a window into the inception of the brain-body dialogue, which is so central to most vertebrate life as we know it, and it’s quite beautiful.” The results also raise the possibility that these neurotransmitters may be acting at a distance, he added—by diffusing through the extracellular space, or going from cell to cell in relay fashion, after they have been triggered by a cell’s voltage changes.

Herrera-Rincon and the rest of the team didn’t stop there. They wanted to see whether they could “rescue” the developing body from these defects by using bioelectricity to mimic the effect of a brain. They decided to express a specific ion channel called HCN2, which acts differently in various cells but is sensitive to their resting potential. Levin likens the ion channel’s effect to a sharpening filter in photo-editing software, in that “it can strengthen voltage differences between adjacent tissues that help you maintain correct boundaries. It really strengthens the abilities of the embryos to set up the correct boundaries for where tissues are supposed to go.”

To make embryos express it, the researchers injected messenger RNA for HCN2 into some frog egg cells just a couple of hours after they were fertilized. A day later they removed the embryos’ brains, and over the next few days, the cells of the embryo acquired novel electrical activity from the HCN2 in their membranes.

The scientists found that this procedure rescued the brainless tadpoles from most of the usual defects. Because of the HCN2 it was as if the brain was still present, telling the body how to develop normally. It was amazing, Levin said, “to see how much rescue you can get just from very simple expression of this channel.” It was also, he added, the first clear evidence that the brain controls the development of the embryo via bioelectric cues.

As with Levin’s previous experiments with bioelectricity and regeneration, many biologists and neuroscientists hailed the findings, calling them “refreshing” and “novel.” “One cannot say that this is really a step forward because this work veers off the common path,” Huang said. But a single experiment with tadpoles’ brains is not enough, he added — it’s crucial to repeat the experiment in other organisms, including mammals, for the findings “to be considered an advance in a field and establish generality.” Still, the results open “an entire new domain of investigation and new of way of thinking,” he said.

Levin’s research demonstrates that the nervous system plays a much more important role in how organisms build themselves than previously thought, said Min Zhao, a biologist at the University of California, Davis, and an expert on the biomedical application and molecular biophysics of electric-field effects in living tissues. Despite earlier experimental and clinical evidence, “this paper is the first one to demonstrate convincingly that this also happens in [the] developing embryo.”

“The results of Mike’s lab abolish the frontier, by demonstrating that electrical signaling from the central nervous system shapes early development,” said Olivier Soriani of the Institut de Biologie de Valrose CNRS. “The bioelectrical activity can now be considered as a new type of input encoding organ patterning, allowing large range control from the central nervous system.”

Carvalho observed that the work has obvious implications for the treatment and prevention of developmental malformations and birth defects—especially since the findings suggest that interfering with the function of a single neurotransmitter may sometimes be enough to prevent developmental issues. “This indicates that a therapeutic approach to these defects may be, at least in some cases, simpler than anticipated,” he said.

Levin speculates that in the future, we may not need to micromanage multitudes of cell-signaling events; instead, we may be able to manipulate how cells communicate with each other electrically and let them fix various problems.

Another recent experiment hinted at just how significant the developing brain’s bioelectric signal might be. Herrera-Rincon soaked frog embryos in common drugs that are normally harmless and then removed their brains. The drugged, brainless embryos developed severe birth defects, such as crooked tails and spinal cords. According to Levin, these results show that the brain protects the developing body against drugs that otherwise might be dangerous teratogens (compounds that cause birth defects). “The paradigm of thinking about teratogens was that each chemical is either a teratogen or is not,” Levin said. “Now we know that this depends on how the brain is working.”

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These findings are impressive, but many questions remain, said Adam Cohen, a biophysicist at Harvard who studies bioelectrical signaling in bacteria. “It is still unclear precisely how the brain is affecting developmental patterning under normal conditions, meaning when the brain is intact.” To get those answers, researchers need to design more targeted experiments; for instance, they could silence specific neurons in the brain or block the release of specific neurotransmitters during development.

Although Levin’s work is gaining recognition, the emphasis he puts on electricity in development is far from universally accepted. Epigenetics and bioelectricity are important, but so are other layers of biology, Zhao said. “They work together to produce the biology we see.” More evidence is needed to shift the paradigm, he added. “We saw some amazing and mind-blowing results in this bioelectricity field, but the fundamental mechanisms are yet to be fully understood. I do not think we are there yet.”

But Nuccitelli says that for many biologists, Levin is on to something. For example, he said, Levin’s success in inducing the growth of misplaced eyes in tadpoles simply by altering the ion flux through the local tissues “is an amazing demonstration of the power of biophysics to control pattern formation.” The abundant citations of Levin’s more than 300 papers in the scientific literature—more than 10,000 times in almost 8,000 articles—is also “a great indicator that his work is making a difference.”

The passage of time and the efforts of others carrying on Levin’s work will help his cause, suggested David Stocum, a developmental biologist and dean emeritus at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis. “In my view, his ideas will eventually be shown to be correct and generally accepted as an important part of the framework of developmental biology.”

“We have demonstrated a proof of principle,” Herrera-Rincon said as she finished preparing another petri dish full of beanlike embryos. “Now we are working on understanding the underlying mechanisms, especially the meaning: What is the information content of the brain-specific information, and how much morphogenetic guidance does it provide?” She washed off the scalpel and took off her gloves and lab coat. “I have a million experiments in my mind.”

Original story reprinted with permission from Quanta Magazine, an editorially independent publication of the Simons Foundation whose mission is to enhance public understanding of science by covering research developments and trends in mathematics and the physical and life sciences.

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