Technology – Jeff Wise

Hurricane Milton Will Be Bad. The Next One Might Be Even Worse.

This article originally ran in New York magazine on October 9, 2024

The warnings began arriving by telegram. A fierce hurricane had just swung around the western tip of Cuba and was heading for Tampa, Florida. When it made landfall at Tarpon Springs on October 25, 1921, it was the storm of the century. Winds of 120 mph smashed steamships and toppled trees, and an 11-foot storm surge swept away buildings and destroyed crops. At least eight people were killed. “Tampa City of Ruins,” a local newspaper declared.

It’s been more than 100 years since a storm this fierce has hit Tampa, but given the climatic trends, storms that formerly registered as once-in-a-lifetime events are going to be happening a lot more frequently. Hurricane seasons are getting more intense, researchers say, and outlier storms are getting bigger. So while Milton is going to be the worst storm that anyone alive has ever seen in the area, it might not be the last of its scale to come around for a while.

Jill Trepanier, a professor of geography at Louisiana State University, has studied the kind of extreme storms that only appear every 30 years. She found that as waters have gotten warmer, the intensity of these storms has increased. “Thirty years ago, when we thought about what a typical 30-year event looked like in Tampa, it was a Category 3,” she says. “Now, it’s inching toward Category 4.”

The Real Goal of Israel’s Exploding-Pager Attack on Hezbollah

This article originally ran in New York magazine on September 18, 2024

The wave of exploding pagers that injured nearly 3,000 and killed at least nine, including a 9-year-old girl, in Lebanon and Syria on Tuesday was a stunning and unexpected blow against Israel’s longtime foe, Hezbollah. While the sheer number of casualties will put a damper on the terrorist group’s ability to wage offensive action, physical incapacitation of enemy fighters likely wasn’t Israel’s primary goal. Rather, the move was likely aimed at creating fear and internal suspicion that would more significantly undermine the group’s ability to fight.

“It promulgates fear,” says Dr. Patrick Sullivan, director of the Modern War Institute at West Point. “It demonstrates to their enemy, ‘Hey, we can reach out and touch you anywhere, anytime.’ I would imagine that Hezbollah is significantly questioning who is in their ranks, who are their suppliers, and what vulnerabilities they have.”

In military science terms, the conflict between Israel and Hezbollah is described as asymmetric. Israel is a nation with a standing army and all the resources of a modern economy. Hezbollah is a paramilitary organization whose members are dispersed among the population of Lebanon. While they have fewer men and weapons than Israel, they can attack by surprise then melt away. (Hezbollah has used these sorts of hit-and-run tactics most recently in its ongoing shelling of Israel’s north.) You can’t destroy a guerrilla organization through the kind of direct, tank-on-tank attritional slugfest that Russia and Ukraine are currently waging. Instead, the core struggle is waged in the informational domain and the strategic objective is to degrade the psychological state of the enemy, according to Sullivan.

The Creepy Coincidences of the Billionaire Superyacht Sinking

This article originally ran in New York magazine on August 26, 2024

The sinking of tech billionaire Mike Lynch’s yacht in a freak storm off the Sicilian coast last week certainly has to rank among the most bizarre fatal celebrity accidents in years. There was the weird coincidence that Lynch had just gotten acquitted after a yearslong legal battle over a multibillion-dollar fraud; the eerie synchrony of the same-day death of his co-defendant after being struck by car while jogging; the fact that the $40 million vessel had been described as virtually unsinkable; the fact no vessel that size had been sunk by a waterspout in centuries; and the fact that the area where it struck is not known for waterspouts. But perhaps the wildest thing about the whole saga is the yacht’s name, Bayesian.

It refers to a method of statistical calculation that was originally devised by an 18th-century Presbyterian minister, Thomas Bayes. Lynch named his yacht after Bayes’s method in recognition of its role in building his fortune. In short, he had honored a method of calculating probabilities — only to be killed aboard its namesake by an accumulation of wildly off-the-chart improbabilities.

“The irony is tragic,” says British science journalist Tom Chivers, who writes for Semafor and published a book this year on Bayesian statistics calledEverything Is Predictable. “It’s not a subtle irony. Bayes is the maths of prediction. This sequence of events is just spectacularly unlikely.”

It’s as if Charles Kane had been crushed to death under a giant rosebud.

The New Age of Sail

This article originally ran on June 6, 2024 in Sherwood News.

On a morning in May, an 78-year-old, 64-foot schooner named the Apollonia raised its sails and cast off from Hudson, New York. As it sailed south it was borne along the half-mile-wide river by a falling tide. The wind was not favorable. The Apollonia could make progress only by tacking at angles to the wind, a process that required three crew members to haul ropes pulling in the sails as the ship turned, before letting them out again once the ship reached its new heading. The ship zigzagged a hundred times before the crew called it quits and tied up for the night.

In the following days other challenges awaited. At Poughkeepsie the crew was becalmed; at Ossining they had to wait for the tide to rise until the water was deep enough to dock. The most difficult stretch of the voyage lay at World’s End, a narrowing of the river near West Point, where the current runs strong and mountain slopes funnel the wind unpredictably. To get through, said the vessel’s captain, Sam Merrett, “you really have to understand the Hudson.”

A week after it set out, and a hundred miles downriver, the Apollonia at last docked at the One°15 Brooklyn Marina. A morning shower had soaked the deck and in the cabin rain gear was hung to dry. The crew looked tired but happy. What they’d accomplished was not much from a practical standpoint — unloading barrels of barley malt at breweries along the way and picking up assorted goods like grain, flour, beer, whiskey, and preserves to deliver to customers downstream — but from a symbolic perspective it could be seen as epic. The Apollonia is the first sail-powered vessel in decades to run cargo along the US coast, and while the ship and its technology are old, its goal is new and ambitious: to demonstrate effective ways to decarbonize the maritime transport industry by 2050.

New York: Have We Already Found Alien Life?

Exciting rumors have been swirling in the halls of astrobiology. The James Webb Space Telescope, which has been scrutinizing the cosmos in unprecedented detail since its deployment in 2022, has been on a tear lately, and folks in the know say it might finally have detected life beyond Earth. That’s the buzz, anyway. Says astrophysicist Rebecca Smethurst, as reported by The Spectator, “I think we are going to get a paper that has strong evidence for a biosignature on an exoplanet very, very soon.”

In other words: Awesome! But also: Calm down. “Strong evidence for a biosignature” is a long way from proof of life on other planets. A biosignature is basically a signal that’s consistent with life but that may also be produced by something else. It’s intriguing but not incontrovertible evidence. And given the many uncertainties surrounding a discipline still in its infancy, the public should not get its hopes up. “So many people want this to be the year. There will definitely be claims,” says Sara Seager, an MIT professor of astrophysics. “There won’t be any robust findings.”

One reason it’s hard to pin down unequivocal evidence of life is that we don’t really know what life is. Here on Earth, biology involves DNA and carbohydrates and requires liquid water, but the chemistry could be different on other worlds. Maybe life could use liquid methane instead of water, or silicon instead of carbon. So, in its most fundamental formulation, what is life all about, and how do we know what to look for?

New York: ‘I Almost Sound Like a Crazy Person, But I Think It Is a Superconductor’

In theory, science is an entirely rational and transparent undertaking. Scientists gather data, form hypotheses, and then collect more data to find out which hypothesis is correct. That’s the idea, anyway. In practice, real-life science is messy and often opaque. Data can be ambiguous. Scientists can be bull-headed. The process of shifting consensus has always been as much about politics and intellectual fashion as about theory and data. Now throw in social media, fanboy culture, preprint archives, and virality — you have a world that breeds all kinds of oddities that can pop up, disappear, and reemerge like quantum virtual particles. All sorts of wild discoveries are bouncing around the information ecosystem before any peer-reviewed journals are able to sort out whether they’re real. And scientists aren’t even all on the same page as to whether this is a good thing or not.

An iteration of flash-mob science erupted last summer, when Twitter users began hyping the work of a South Korean team that said it had discovered a material that was superconductive at room temperature and pressure. Bolstering the claim was a video showing a chunk of material partially levitating. As we reported at the time, if the findings were replicated, it would have massive practical implications for things like levitating trains and quantum computing.

Then the story collapsed.

New York: Air Travel Is Not Ready for Electronic Warfare

Airway UM688 cuts an invisible path through the air from Samsun, Turkey, on the Black Sea coast down through Basra, Iraq, on the Persian Gulf and is used heavily by airliners traveling from Europe to the Gulf States. One stretch in particular, a 280-mile-long section in northeastern Iraq, has become a hot topic in pilot forums online. Planes passing through experience all kinds of strange system malfunctions.

“What’s happening is that the plane is flying along normally, everything is very chill, very relaxed, you probably have a foot up on the pedestal and you’re doing your crossword. And then, suddenly, either the plane will start to turn or you’ll get a whole bunch of warnings: terrain failure, navigation error, position error,” says Mark Zee, the founder of OpsGroup, an online forum that collects pilots’ reports. “For the crews, the initial reaction is What the hell is going on?” In at least 15 cases, pilots became so confused that they had to ask air-traffic control to tell them which direction to take. In one incident, a business jet nearly passed into Iranian airspace.

Someone, it seems, has been confusing the planes’ navigation systems by transmitting false GPS signals, a technique called “spoofing.” “Commercial aircraft are having their GPS units captured and taken fully under the control of the spoofer,” says Todd Humphreys, a professor of aerospace engineering at the University of Texas at Austin. “It’s eye-opening and unprecedented.”

New York: The Tunnel War

After her release from two weeks of Hamas captivity, 85-year-old Yochaved Lifshitz described being marched for several kilometers underground by her captors through “a giant system of tunnels, like spiderwebs.” Few other Israelis had seen the Gaza Strip’s storied tunnel complex, but many are now going to get the chance.

Israeli Defense Forces that pressed several miles into Gaza beginning last Friday are forced to contend with a sophisticated labyrinth of underground tunnels and bunkers constructed over several decades by Hamas, hiding fighters, weapons, and more than 200 Israeli hostages. The elaborate system is believed to extend for hundreds of miles and, in some locations, lies several hundred feet below ground. Military experts who have studied Hamas call the tunnels a formidable defensive system that would be incredibly costly for Israeli troops to neutralize, even after several weeks of heavy bombardment targeting the network.

New York: Why NASA Wants Your UFO Videos

Last year, as the topic of UFOs was exploding back into the mainstream, NASA convened a panel of outside experts, the UAP Independent Study Team, to assess the unclassified evidence the government had collected. (UAP, for “Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena,” is the government-approved euphemism for UFO.) The group was a science-nerd murderers’ row whose purpose was to help the space agency handle a subject that had long attracted conspiracy theories — but which was also grounds for legitimate questions, considering the unexplained objects people had been observing and recording with increasing frequency. Heading the 17-member panel was Dr. David Spergel, a longtime Princeton professor of astrophysics who in 2021 took over as president of the Simons Foundation, a $5 billion nonprofit that supports basic science research. The group held a public meeting to discuss its work in May and released its final report last month. Among its top-line findings was that it had found no evidence of extraterrestrial UFOs, but that more data would be needed to settle the matter conclusively — including data from civilians who capture unidentified phenomena. It was a circumspect conclusion that, predictably, did little to satisfy true believers on either side of the UAP divide.

Intelligencer spoke with Spergel at his office at the Simons Foundation’s building near Madison Square, where he discussed why NASA got involved in the hunt for UFOs, what the odds of finding aliens are, and whether David Duchovny really believes that the truth is out there.

Why did NASA want to get involved in UFOs?
This starts with the Navy starting to declassify a bunch of images. The most famous one is the “Tic Tac” [filmed by a U.S. Navy fighter off the coast of San Diego], which is about 20 years old now. You look at those incidents and you say, “There’s something weird going on we don’t understand.” Then, having delved into the incident a bit, you realize that you wish they collected better data. What we’re left with is hard to interpret. NASA is a scientific agency. It’s charged with investigating the unknown. And the head of NASA announced, “We’re going to weigh in on this.”

After looking at evidence declassified by the Pentagon’s UAP organization, AARO (“All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office”), the panel concluded that most reported UAPs were either balloons, drones, or airplanes. What does that tell you?
The number of drones that are up at any given moment is enormous — they’re just monitoring fires and gas pipelines and helping farmers monitor crops. There’s also a ton of balloons. It turns out that small amateur balloons below a certain size didn’t have to be reported to the FAA. There’s probably some regulatory cleanup needed to make sure that balloons at low altitudes are not a threat to pilots.

New York: The Floating Speck That Promised to Change the World

The video is subtle. A small, regular chip of stonelike material as wide as the end of a ballpoint pen rests on a flat metal surface. But it’s not resting, exactly: While one end touches the metal, the other end floats above the surface, and when pushed it bobs like a cork. It’s levitating.

If the physical scale of the phenomenon was small, the response by science enthusiasts was anything but. “Today might have seen the biggest physics discovery of my lifetime. I don’t think people fully grasp the implications,” a former Princeton physics undergraduate named Alex Kaplan tweeted. The tweet has since been viewed 30 million times.

The video was attached to one of a pair of papers published by a team of researchers from South Korea on July 22 on the Arxiv preprint server, a site where scientists can post papers that haven’t yet been through the peer-review vetting process. They described the results of experiments conducted with LK-99, a lab-made substance containing lead, oxygen, phosphorus, and sulfur. (The name derives from the initials of its inventors and the year they created it.) The levitation could be explained by the Meissner effect, a characteristic of materials that are superconducting, meaning they carry electrical current without any resistance. The authors made no bones about what they thought they’d found, titling one of their reports “The First Room-Temperature Ambient-Pressure Superconductor.” This was no modest claim; scientists have spent decades searching for a substance that is superconducting under normal, day-to-day conditions, and finding one would have a revolutionary impact on a wide range of industries. “Our new development will be a brand-new historical event that opens a new era for humankind,” the authors concluded.

The story spread far and wide, from Twitter, Tik Tok, and Twitch to every mainstream publication. One of the science influencers touting LK-99’s incredible potential was San Francisco–based applied physicist Andrew Cote, who tweeted, “if successful LK-99 would be a watershed moment for humanity easily on-par with invention of the transistor.” His tweets, too, received millions of views.

As the news spread, so did optimism. For a time, one online betting market was posting better-than-even odds that the superconductor claims would pan out.

But would the findings prove replicable?