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[Mexico City surgeon Jose] Mosso’s Jeep Cherokee is full to bursting. Tents, plastic food boxes, surgical equipment, medication, sanitary products and bags filled with clothes, sweaters and shoes are squeezed into every available space inside and tied precariously to the roof. On the back seat are Mosso’s wife, Veronica – a gynaecologist – their youngest son, Olivier, and, to keep the nine-year-old entertained, two baby iguanas recently captured from the forest near Acapulco, confined for the journey in a green net bag.

There’s a long drive ahead. We are going to El Tepeyac, an isolated village hundreds of kilometres away in the mountains of Guerrero state. It’s home to an indigenous Me’phaa community (often called Tlapaneco by outsiders), one of Mexico’s poorest. “They have been forgotten,” says Mosso. “They live with cold, on top of the mountain. They don’t have hospitals, clinics, nothing.”

As the high-rise blocks of Mexico City give way to sprawling shanty towns and then forested mountains, Mosso tells me about his father, Victorio. He was born close to El Tepeyac but left when he was 13, eventually becoming a teacher near Acapulco. He returned briefly to his childhood home after getting married, but never visited again until Mosso took him 40 years later. They found Victorio’s youngest brother, Faustino. At first, neither brother recognised the other. “They said ‘You look too old!’” recalls Mosso. “Then they were hugging, crying, a lot of emotions. It was the first time I saw my father cry.”

Mosso was shocked by the poverty he saw, with dwellings that he felt could barely be described as houses. The villagers asked him to examine a patient, an old woman with a fever who was lying in a puddle on the floor (there had been a recent flood, and it was the only place close to the fire). She had pneumonia; Mosso told them there was nothing he could do. “She was my aunt,” he says. “It was the last time I saw her. She died a few weeks later.” He pauses, eyes fixed on the road. “That’s why I go back. Because of my aunt.”

This excerpt is from “Virtually painless: How VR is making surgery simpler”, my article for Mosaic. To read more (it’s free), click here: https://mosaicscience.com/story/virtual-reality-VR-surgery-pain-mexico

They had been digging for days, shaded from the Greek sun by a square of green tarpaulin slung between olive trees. The archaeologists used picks to break the cream-colored clay, baked as hard as rock, until what began as a cluster of stones just visible in the dirt became four walls in a neat rectangle, sinking down into the earth. Little more than the occasional animal bone, however, came from the soil itself. On the morning of May 28, 2015, the sun gave way to an unseasonable drizzle. The pair digging that day, Flint Dibble and Alison Fields, waited for the rain to clear, then stepped down into their meter-deep hole and got to work. Dibble looked at Fields. “It’s got to be soon,” he said.

The season had not started well. The archaeologists were part of a group of close to three dozen researchers digging near the ancient Palace of Nestor, on a hilltop near Pylos on the southwest coast of Greece. The palace was built in the Bronze Age by the Mycenaeans—the heroes described in Homer’s epic poems—and was first excavated in the 1930s. The dig’s leaders, Jack Davis and Sharon Stocker, husband-and-wife archaeologists from the University of Cincinnati, in Ohio, had hoped to excavate in a currant field just downslope from the palace, but Greek bureaucracy and a lawyers’ strike kept them from obtaining the necessary permits. So they settled, disappointed, on a neighboring olive grove. They cleared the land of weeds and snakes and selected a few spots to investigate, including three stones that appeared to form a corner. As the trench around the stones sank deeper, the researchers allowed themselves to grow eager: The shaft’s dimensions, two meters by one meter, suggested a grave, and Mycenaean burials are famous for their breathtakingly rich contents, able to reveal volumes about the culture that produced them. Still, there was no proof that this structure was even ancient, the archaeologists reminded themselves, and it might simply be a small cellar or shed.

Dibble was clearing earth from around a large stone slab when his pick hit something hard and the monotony of the clay was broken by a vivid flash of green: bronze. The pair immediately put down their picks, and after placing an excited call to Davis and Stocker they began to carefully sweep up the soil and dust. They knew they were standing atop something substantial, but even then they did not imagine just how rich the discovery would turn out to be…

This excerpt is from “The Golden Warrior: A 3,500-year-old tomb exposes the roots of Western civilisation”, my cover story in the January/February 2017 issue of Smithsonian magazine. To read on (it’s free), click here: http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/golden-warrior-greek-tomb-exposes-roots-western-civilization-180961441/

Hannes Schroeder snaps on two pairs of blue latex gloves, then wipes his hands with a solution of bleach. In front of him is a large Tupperware box full of plastic bags that each contain sea water and a piece of red-stained bone. He lifts one out and inspects its contents as several archaeologists hover behind, waiting for his verdict. They’re hoping he can pull off a feat never attempted before — DNA analysis on someone who has been under the sea for 2,000 years.

Through the window, sunlight sparkles on cobalt water. The researchers are on the tiny Greek island of Antikythera, a 10-minute boat ride from the wreckage of a 2,000-year-old merchant ship. Discovered by sponge divers in 1900, the wreck was the first ever investigated by archaeologists. Its most famous bounty to date has been a surprisingly sophisticated clockwork device that modelled the motions of the Sun, Moon and planets in the sky — dubbed the ‘Antikythera mechanism’.

But on 31 August this year, investigators made another groundbreaking discovery: a human skeleton, buried under around half a metre of pottery sherds and sand…

This excerpt is from my news article in the 20 September 2016 issue of Nature. To read on and watch a video (it’s free), click here: http://www.nature.com/news/human-skeleton-found-on-famed-antikythera-shipwreck-1.20632

In April, Ted Kaptchuk addressed hundreds of physicians and scientists at the Behind and Beyond the Brain symposium in Porto, Portugal. Within minutes, ripples of laughter were spreading around the conference hall.

Kaptchuk, a researcher at Harvard Medical School in Boston, Massachusetts, was showing the audience a cartoon in which a doctor hands over a prescription note. “I want you to take this placebo,” says the white-coated medic to her bemused patient. “If your condition doesn’t improve, I’ll give you a stronger one.” The chuckles were a response to the absurdity of openly treating a patient with fake pills. By definition, placebos have no active ingredient, so the idea that someone might benefit from knowingly taking one — let alone that different placebos could have different effects — seems nonsensical. But Kaptchuk invited his audience to take the scene seriously. Honest placebos can work, he insisted. And some placebos really are stronger than others.

Kaptchuk’s trials are overturning many assumptions about the best way to care for patients, particularly those in pain. After four decades of probing the mechanisms of placebo responses, researchers are advancing the argument that inert pills are more than just negative controls in clinical trials: they can be a treatment in their own right.

This excerpt is from my feature in a special supplement on pain, in the 14 July 2016 issue of Nature. To read on (it’s free), click here: http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v535/n7611_supp/full/535S14a.html

I struggle to keep my footing on a narrow ridge of earth snaking between flooded fields of rice. The stalks, almost ready to harvest, ripple in the breeze, giving the valley the appearance of a shimmering green sea. In the distance, steep limestone hills rise from the ground, perhaps 400 feet tall, the remains of an ancient coral reef. Rivers have eroded the landscape over millions of years, leaving behind a flat plain interrupted by these bizarre towers, called karsts, which are full of holes, channels and interconnecting caves carved by water seeping through the rock.

We’re on the island of Sulawesi, in Indonesia, an hour’s drive north of the bustling port of Makassar. We approach the nearest karst undeterred by a group of large black macaques that screech at us from trees high on the cliff and climb a bamboo ladder through ferns to a cave called Leang Timpuseng. Inside, the usual sounds of everyday life here—cows, roosters, passing motorbikes—are barely audible through the insistent chirping of insects and birds. The cave is cramped and awkward, and rocks crowd into the space, giving the feeling that it might close up at any moment. But its modest appearance can’t diminish my excitement: I know this place is host to something

magical, something I’ve traveled nearly 8,000 miles to see.

Scattered on the walls are stencils, human hands outlined against a background of red paint. Though faded, they are stark and evocative, a thrilling message from the distant past. My companion, Maxime Aubert, directs me to a narrow semicircular alcove, like the apse of a cathedral, and I crane my neck to a spot near the ceiling a few feet above my head. Just visible on darkened grayish rock is a seemingly abstract pattern of red lines.

Then my eyes focus and the lines coalesce into a figure, an animal with a large, bulbous body, stick legs and a diminutive head: a babirusa, or pig-deer, once common in these valleys. Aubert points out its neatly sketched features in admiration. “Look, there’s a line to represent the ground,” he says. “There are no

tusks—it’s female. And there’s a curly tail at the back.”

This ghostly babirusa has been known to locals for decades, but it wasn’t until Aubert, a geochemist and archaeologist, used a technique he developed to date the painting that its importance was revealed. He found that it is staggeringly ancient: at least 35,400 years old. That likely makes it the oldest-known example of figurative art anywhere in the world—the world’s very first picture.

It’s among more than a dozen other dated cave paintings on Sulawesi that now rival the earliest cave art in Spain and France, long believed to be the oldest on earth.

The findings made headlines around the world when Aubert and his colleagues announced them in late 2014, and the implications are revolutionary. They smash our most common ideas about the origins of art and force us to embrace a far richer picture of how and where our species first awoke.

Hidden away in a damp cave on the “other” side of the world, this curly-tailed creature is our closest link yet to the moment when the human mind, with its unique capacity for imagination and symbolism, switched on.

This excerpt is from my feature in the Jan/Feb 2016 issue of Smithsonian magazine. To read on (it’s free), click here: http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/journey-oldest-cave-paintings-world-180957685/

I have a background in microbiology – for my PhD I studied the corkscrew-shaped bacterium Campylobacter jejuni – so when I was recently asked to interview Rutgers University microbiologist Paul Falkowski for the brilliant website Five Books, I jumped at the chance to hear about his recommended reads.

First up was what Falkowski describes as an “oldie but goldie”: Micrographia by Robert Hooke. This 1665 book is still in print, celebrating its 350^th anniversary this year. In it, Hooke described what he saw with the help of a new-fangled invention for the time: a microscope. It includes breathtakingly accurate illustrations of structures from fleas’ eyes to flies’ wings, as well as tiny chambers in a slice of cork that reminded Hooke of the rooms in which monks lived: he called them “cells”.

“It was the first book that really showed the public what the world they could not see with their naked eye looked like,” says Falkowski. And it fascinated people – the diarist Samuel Pepys apparently stayed up till two in the morning reading it.

Then we talked about the 2003 book Life on a Young Planet by Andrew Knoll. Many authors telling the story of life on earth might start with the emergence of animals and planets, but that’s precisely where Knoll stops. Instead, he addresses life’s first three billion years. “What Andy has done is really exposed us to the world before animals and plants,” says Falkowski, “when there was strong evidence of life but the world was totally controlled by single celled organisms, the protists.”

I was surprised by Falkowski’s next choice, The Genesis of Germs by Alan Gillen. This is a creationist text arguing that microbes, like all life, were created by God. It turned out Falkowski wanted to discuss this book not for what it gets right, but for what it gets wrong.

“It’s 148 years since the first edition of The Origin of Species was published,” he says. “Here you have a person studying the organisms that most obviously represent a history of evolution, and yet, amazingly, the idea of microbes appeals to him as a creationist.” Creationism is a popular belief in the US, of course. “We currently have 14 candidates in the Republican Party running for president of the United States. Not one of them will be able to stand up in front of a television audience in the United States and say, ‘I believe in evolution,’ and win the nomination.”

In fact, says Falkowski, microbes provide some of best evidence we have for Darwinian evolution. “One of the very best ways we can prove evolution works as a process is because we can select for natural mutations in E.coli generations that have gone on for years,” he says. “My colleague Rich Lenski has 30 years of continuous cultures of E. coli, and they have evolved. It is not possible to reconcile the demonstrable evidence with a religious worldview of creationism.”

We also discussed Microcosmos by Lynn Margulis and Dorion Sagan, a classic 1986 book pushing the now-accepted idea that the complex cells making up animals and plants were formed when bacteria engulfed other bacteria. This process formed organelles inside the host cells: energy-producing factories called mitochondria, and chloroplasts, which carry out photosynthesis. Discussions of evolution often focus on competition and conflict, but Margulis instead emphasised symbiosis and cooperation, where species work together to create something stronger than either might achieve alone.

But my favourite of Falkowski’s recommendations is Plankton: Wonders of the Drifting World by Christian Sardet, published this year. This book features exquisite images of different forms of plankton from baby sea urchins to carnivorous comb jellies. Sardet is a French developmental biologist who sailed around the world sampling and photographing marine organisms as as part of the Tara expedition.

“It’s a 21st century version of a Robert Hooke book,” says Falkowski. “If you were to take Hooke and bring him into the modern world and say, ‘OK Bobby, here you go, here’s a microscope, and by the way, you have this new thing called a “camera” and you can take pictures of the beasts!’ he would have had been in scientific Heaven – just like Christian when he made these images.”

Hooke would have been fascinated by plankton, Falkowski reckons, and would have loved these gorgeous images that bring the microscopic world to life.

You can read the full Five Books interview – with links to all the books – here.