James' World 2

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Mother is sharing tablet PC with boy at home.  Parents/Morsa Images via getty

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Today mathematician Alan Turing is world-famous because he helped the Allies achieve victory against the Axis powers by deciphering an encryption that was considered unbreakable. That story inspired the 2014 film The Imitation Game. Turing’s cryptographic work remained under wraps until the 1970s, however, so his incredible achievements only became known after his death.During his lifetime, Turing was known among certain experts. He developed the mathematical model of a computer and explained which mathematical

quantities it could calculate—and which tasks would exceed even the most sophisticated algorithms. He is also well known for a test that he developed, later named after him, that assesses how “human” artificial intelligence appears to be. For instance, if people cannot tell whether they are chatting to a real person or an AI, then the machine has passed the Turing test.

The list of Turing’s scientific contributions is long. But one area of his research is rarely mentioned: his work on mathematical biology that dealt with the formation of patterns. He was interested in the question of how animals develop their impressive stripes and spots, and he was convinced that there must be a mechanism by which pigments in skin cells arrange themselves into these patterns.

How Does the Tiger Get Its Stripes?

When I first heard about this, I was puzzled. One of my physics professors mentioned a link between abstract mathematical operators and a tiger’s stripes in a first-semester lecture, a connection that made me and my fellow students laugh rather than think. After all, what could the pattern of a tiger’s skin have to do with abstract mathematics? Until then, I had assumed that some complex biochemical processes led to the tiger’s impressive patterns of dots and stripes—not something that could be represented by a tensor (a kind of high-dimensional table).

I now realize that I lacked Turing’s imagination. According to his mother, even as a child, he was a dreamer who marveled at the natural world around him. He wanted to understand his surroundings. Mathematics lent itself as a language to reduce even the most complex relationships to the essentials. And so Turing found a very simple mechanism that could explain nature’s patterns.

To understand Turing’s ideas, you first need a little biological background. A tiger’s coat pattern is already determined before it is born. In the embryo, pigment-producing cells emerge at the point where the spinal column will later develop. From there, they migrate through the entire body. Although research into these cells was lacking in Turing’s time, he recognized that there was a developmental process that formed skin patterns, and he wanted to find out how this occurred.

It was impossible to model all the interacting molecules of an animal embryo. Moreover, Turing was not an expert in biochemistry. Therefore, as is usual for mathematicians, he started with a very simple model. He investigated how two different pigment-producing molecules, which he generally called morphogens, spread from cell to cell.

A Story of Two Morphogens

Let’s assume that one morphogen is responsible for the color black and another for orange. The more black or orange morphogens there are, the more of these molecules are generally produced. In addition, these two substances influence each other: the orange morphogens can inhibit the production of the black ones.

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I have a photographic memory of the Christmas morning when a 10-year-old me was given the gift she’d been begging for — a Chinese box turtle we named Ping — carried down to the living room in his then-squeaky-clean glass enclosure like a little prince on parade. Despite Ping later being set free by the well-meaning people who had graciously inherited him (and likely killed within five minutes of freedom), Ping had a good life. He ate his lettuce pieces and chicken bits, swam in his plastic pool, occasionally scuttled across our kitchen floor. But, looking back, it’s not like my life was necessarily greatly enhanced by Ping — or by Dandelion the rabbit, or the pair of newts who lived in our bathroom, or Mei Li, the cat who hated people. Which is probably why, as an adult, I have never thought of pets as more than a nuisance.

Given my early cat trauma, I have often cited some combination of landlord restrictions and vague allergies whenever my kids brought up pets. But when we moved out of our two-bedroom apartment into a larger house last fall, I began to run out of excuses. I also began to wonder if I was missing out on something. We had been a little family, not stable by any means but at least consistent, for years now. Couldn’t we stand growing a bit? Around Christmas, I indulged myself in looking at the available cats at the local animal shelter. I imagined something simpler than my kids but more rewarding than my Peloton. In January, we brought home a 6-month-old tuxedo cat we named Midnight. (Sorry, shelter volunteers, but “Jerry” is not a cat name.) I am almost embarrassed to tell you how much I love this cat.

And when I asked my son, who gets easily anxious and dysregulated easily, why he was seeming so chill lately, he answered immediately: “Midnight.” Far from ruining our lives, our kitty does provide the company you are speculating a dog might — he snuggles with the kids when they are upset, provides me with the maternal adoration my children are slowly losing, and regularly serves as a peace offering when we hurt each other. I don’t know that the leopard gecko we tried to talk our kids down to would have achieved all this. With all due respect to goldfish, my experience tells me that they mostly just swim in circles.

But every family is different, and our experience is just our own, I surveyed a few dozen parents, with and without pets, to see what was going on in their households. Plenty of parents are ambivalent about family pets or fully against getting them. Angela, a mom of two, put it like this: “the last thing I need is another dependent!” Other parents who have said no to pets cited being at the limits of caretaking already (“Aren’t kids enough unpaid labor??”), as well as space issues, the expense and logistics of caring for them when traveling, and for one mom, the smell. (After 30 years, I can still perform olfactory teleportation and conjure the rankness of Ping’s cage.) One mother, Kate, admitted that she regrets adopting a cat for her kids: Like Mei Li, the cat’s love language is attacking humans, and Kate’s kids are now begging for a dog instead.

More of the parents I spoke to, however, believed that their animals, and what their animals meant to their children, were well worth it.

When Margaret and Brent, parents to 5-year-old Tycho, first started dating, a central component of their courtship was texting each other pictures of pit bull puppies. But after they had their son, Margaret felt overwhelmed by the idea of taking on another responsibility. “What if we end up with a dog who has medical complications or serious behavioral issues?” she wondered. When she pushed through her worries and adopted Phoebe, a sweet brown pit bull mix, they gained an essential family member. Tycho, who is autistic, took to Phoebe instantly, running alongside her at the beach and adding her name as one of his first spoken words. Phoebe is not only like a sibling to Tycho, whose older half-brothers are out of the house, but she helps him through transitions, something that can often cause him great distress. “If he gets to hold the leash,” Margaret admits, “he’ll kind of go anywhere.”

Several of the parents I surveyed used the terms “sibling” or “best friend” to describe their kids’ relationship with their pets (usually dogs or cats), in all the good and challenging ways, the latter often leading to growth, especially for only children. As one parent of a 19-month-old put it: “Sometimes she wants to smother [the dog] in love, other times she is frustrated by his presence. But he is teaching her to tolerate the existence of another being in our family that requires attention, care, and love.” Another parent referred to their dog as “screen-free entertainment.”

As far as having another dependent, for us, a cat feels like a good balance. Do the kids actually help? Studies are inconclusive, but my anecdotal experience is don’t count on it. While I was surprised to hear from my mom that I was actually a dutiful cleaner of Ping’s cage and attender of his vet appointments, my kids have been a real disappointment in terms of practical help with Midnight. Despite having had a democratic chore-picking session when we first got him, they have pretty much done zero daily feeding or cleaning. But they do care for him on their own unhelpful but sweet timelines, brushing him when they’re in the mood or clearing out his litter box when it feels like a game.

But other kids, it seems, are better than mine! Kim, father to Oscar, 7, and dog-father to Zazzie, claims that Oscar completes dog-related chores each morning. Darina’s 8-year-old actually walks one of their dogs! And Joy’s 9-year-old daughter not only feeds the dogs twice a day (“90% of the time, and only complains/drags her feet some of the time”) but also feeds and cleans the cage of her bearded dragon.

Of course, we couldn’t have had Midnight in our old apartment (there’s the space thing), and he’s already set us back a few hundred bucks. (Margaret told me, unapologetically, that she’s spent at least $10,000 on Phoebe’s medical bills.) But we were gifted a feeder by my sister, we bought some very cheap secondhand toys, and we are hoping keeping him inside will help.

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Romper

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In hindsight, I am still not sure why the operators of the Danish-flagged MV Coco allowed me onboard. By the time I arrived last June, the vessel had been sailing for several weeks in the Bismarck Sea, a part of Papua New Guinea’s territorial waters, digging chunks of metal-rich deposits out of the ocean floor with a 12-ton hydraulic claw. The crew was testing the feasibility of mining seafloor deposits full of copper and some gold. It was probably the closest thing in the world to an operational deep-sea mining site. And the more I learned about the endeavor, the more surprised I became about the project’s very existence.

On that summer morning, I arrived on a red catamaran after rolling over six-foot swells in the South Pacific for two hours, and I clambered up a metal ladder hanging down on the Coco’s starboard side. The 270-foot, 4,000-ton vessel towers at its prow, its vast aft deck full of cranes, winches, and a remotely operated submersible. I was there at the invitation of Richard Parkinson, who founded Magellan, a company that specializes in deep-sea operations. At the top of the ladder, two crew members hauled me onboard the ship, which was roughly 20 miles from the closest shore, and a British manager for Magellan named James Holt greeted me, his smile sun-creased from more than two decades at sea. After a safety briefing, he ushered me through a heavy door into a dark, windowless shipping container on the rear deck that served as a control room.

Inside the hushed cabin was a young Brazilian named Afhonso Perseguin, his face lit by screens displaying digital readings and colorful topographic charts. Gripping a joystick with his right hand, he delicately maneuvered a big, boxy remotely operated vehicle, or ROV, over a patch of seafloor a mile below. I watched on monitors as a robotic arm protruded from the ROV toward a monstrous set of clamshell jaws suspended from a cable that rose all the way up to the ship. Perseguin used the ROV’s arm to steer the jaws as a colleague beside him radioed instructions to a winch operator on deck.

Hydraulics drove the open clamshell into a gray chunk of flat seafloor ringed by rocky mounds and jagged slopes. The opposing teeth dug in, throwing up clouds of silt that filled the video feeds from the ROV. The robotic arm released, and the winch started hauling the jaws, clamped shut around their rocky cargo, on an hour-long journey up to the ship.

Within minutes, Perseguin reversed the ROV to survey the wider scene, revealing chimneys of rock looming up from the seafloor, pale yellow and gray in the submersible’s powerful lights. Small mollusk shells dotted their surface; a crab scuttled out of frame. “Quite amazing, really, isn’t it?” murmured John Matheson, a shaven-headed Scot supervising the ROV team. As Perseguin steered the ROV slowly around a column, the cameras suddenly captured a glassy plume of unmistakably warmer water spewing up from a hidden crevice.

Hydraulics drove the monstrous clamshell jaws into a gray chunk of seafloor, throwing up clouds of silt that filled the video feeds from the remotely operated vehicle.

That hydrothermal vent marked the edge of a tectonic plate in the Bismarck Sea. The metal-rich magma ejected over millennia from several such vents—some dormant, some still active like this one—was Magellan’s prize. The teams on the ship, hired by a company called Deep Sea Mining Finance (DSMF), were conducting bulk seafloor mining tests under a 2011 mining license issued by the Papua New Guinea (PNG) mining regulator. I was the only reporter onboard to witness the operation. 

Worldwide, oceanographers have found three distinct types of mineral deposits on the deep seafloor. Manganese crust is an inches-thick, metal-rich pavement that builds up over millions of years as dissolved metallic compounds in seawater gradually precipitate on certain seafloor regions. Polymetallic nodules are softball-size, metal-rich rocks strewn across enormous seafloor fields. And massive sulfide deposits, such as the ones being mined by the crew of the Coco, are big mounds and stacks of rock formed around hydrothermal vents. Over the past decade, several companies have developed detailed but still hypothetical plans to profit from these deposits, hoping to help meet the world’s surging demand for the valuable metals necessary for batteries, electric cars, electronics, and many other products. Scientists have warned that these efforts risk destroying unique deep-sea habitats that we do not yet fully understand, and governments have been reluctant to grant exploration licenses in their territorial waters. But from what I saw during my two days and one night onboard the Coco, DSMF was digging in, and a new era of deep-sea mining had all but begun. 

Holt, one of Magellan’s offshore managers, said the aim was to test the physical requirements and environmental impacts of pulling up sulfide deposits. What would soon become unclear, however, was why the operators were stockpiling mounds of excavated rock on the seabed, and who in PNG knew the Coco was there.

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Mark Smith

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