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slate.com The Hottest Restaurant in America Does Only One Thing. Its Fans Are Obsessed. Its Secret Is There for All to See. Steffi Cao 20–26 minutes

Michelangelo's God, in the painting "The Creation of Adam," reaching out to touch a Raising Cane's combo tray containing chicken fingers, coleslaw, fries, and a drink in a red cup.

Photo illustration by Slate. Photos by Michelangelo, Public Domain, and Raising Cane’s. Moneybox The Church of Raising Cane’s The hottest restaurant chain in America is inspiring people to fly 16 hours to try it. I went to find out why—and I saw too much.

Aug 24, 20265:40 AM

Last November, Cierra Barrera arrived at the restaurant in Grand Rapids, Michigan, at 9 the night before it opened—and she wasn’t the first. More than a dozen people were already set up in front of her. For the next 13 hours, Barrera waited, vlogging her entire experience as temperatures dipped into the 40s and a brief morning rain washed over the crowd.

Still, everyone remained. It was worth it. After all, this wasn’t just any restaurant. It was Raising Cane’s.

“I’m kind of embarrassed, because I’ve never actually done this before, and there’s already people here,” she exclaimed in the video. “I’m thinking, This is a little too early, nobody’s going to be here. But people are here.”

She told me later: “When I got ahead of when Cane’s was opening in my city, I made sure to put it in my calendar.”

You should expect no less for Raising Cane’s, a chicken-finger spot that inspires something close to religious devotion among its growing flock. It recently surpassed KFC to become America’s third-biggest chicken chain, and it’s hot on the heels of Popeyes too. (Princely Chick-fil-A remains far and away No. 1, but never say never.) In the past five years alone, the chain has doubled its domestic sales to nearly $5 billion and opened more than 250 restaurants in the U.S.

Cane’s secret sauce—besides the beloved Cane’s Sauce itself—is those fans. They are not like other fast-food fans. They are evangelists who worship at its Texas toast–padded altar. Caniacs, as they are called, camp out overnight and cause traffic pileups at new locations. About 250 people slept outside the Charlotte, North Carolina, store the night before it opened in February, when the temperature hit a low of 25 degrees. Hordes of international influencers have flown to the U.S. specifically to try the crispy chicken and that renowned dipping sauce.

Their devotion knows few limits.

At the Times Square location at noon on a steaming Wednesday in August, I got a taste of just how intense the fandom has become. Tourists hauled their suitcases over the doorstep into the fray, fresh off a flight or rushing to make one, if only they could get one last chicken finger first.

“Get a video of the DJ—it’s only here,” one woman told her husband over pounding Bruno Mars, clutching her fanny pack. Another couple, wearing designer sunglasses, told me that they had traveled here all the way from Italy to try Cane’s. That’s about all they could say in English.

Standing by the DJ booth with an armful of shopping bags, a tourist named Paul told me that he and his son have taken several trips from the Philippines to the States. “We try to come to Cane’s every time,” he said. “He loves it.”

The mania is intense for a chain that entered the American market relatively recently. Todd Graves, who is still co-CEO, opened the first location 30 years ago this month—Aug. 28, 1996, to be exact—across the gates from Louisiana State University. That’s 60 years after KFC opened its doors in Kentucky.

“At that time, I saw a gap that needed to be filled in the market,” Graves, who named the restaurant after his dog, told me. “Many concepts were offering chicken tenders, but none were craveable. It’s that craveability that sets us apart, and the way we’ve been able to maintain that is by focusing on doing one thing and doing it better than anyone else.”

Indeed, Cane’s does only one thing, and that thing is chicken. Every single Cane’s meal has basically the same components: chicken, fries, toast, sauce, and sometimes coleslaw. That’s it. All of this rests on the hook of one single (chicken) finger. Compared to other quick-service competitors, who are increasingly offering labyrinthine menus with new products rolled out seasonally and limited runs of nostalgia items, Cane’s menu feels sparse, with a sort of Steve Jobs Apple-era minimalism. Except for chicken.

Could all this hype really be for a chicken finger? What is happening here? The more I looked into the cult of Cane’s, the more I understood how the country’s most obsessed-over digit-shaped delicacy took America by storm, slowly and then all at once.

Historically, chicken was a bit of an afterthought in fast food. America’s predominant drive-through fixation has been the beef: Burger King’s Whopper, McDonald’s Big Mac, White Castle’s sliders (widely acknowledged as the first fast food in America), Arby’s litany of meats. Chicken was something of a side act to the main stage, marketed primarily as a kid’s-meal option. But in the latter half of the 20th century, new research about the dangers of cholesterol and fat in beef began to shift consumer tides toward leaner proteins. To meet that demand, massive corporate farms also began churning out chicken, lowering the cost of the meat. Chicken not only became a more affordable option; it started being associated with less health risk.

Chicken now holds its own as a fast-food category. Americans eat twice as much chicken today as they did in the 1970s, and fast-food places focusing specifically on chicken began swallowing truly staggering amounts of market share. Bojangles, the Southern fried chicken drive-through, began in 1977; Zaxby’s, Wingstop, and Raising Cane’s all opened in the 1990s. Dave’s Hot Chicken was founded just nine years ago, in 2017. Even international chains like Jollibee, the popular Filipino fried chicken spot, has spread throughout the U.S. in recent years.

The competition in the chicken landscape is likewise intense, and corporations are battling to capture audience attention with different chicken offerings. Nothing illustrates this better than the great “Chicken Sandwich Wars” of 2019, when Popeyes decided to put its fried chicken on a bun and top it with mayo and two pickle slices— and it sold out within a month. The chain had officially entered chicken sandwich territory, and this quickly spurred a massive fight with the OG sandwich maker Chick-fil-A, with the two brands throwing jabs at each other online for weeks. By January 2021, more than 20 American fast-food brands had introduced or rereleased chicken sandwiches, including Panda Express, which launched an Orange Chicken Sandwich.

For nonsandwiches, the chicken war is fought in sauces, suitable terrain for blank-canvas fried chicken and consumers who increasingly expect their food to be modifiable. (Think of it as the Starbucks menu effect.) Wingstop offers 13 different dipping sauces, and Buffalo Wild Wings boasts 23 different flavorings. Chili’s infamous Triple Dipper allows diners to dunk everything from its honey-chipotle chicken crispers (read: fingers) to its fried mozzarella sticks into any number of dipping sauces. Dave’s Hot Chicken quickly rolled out its own version, the Big Trio.

But while all these chains rush to roll out more seasonal offerings and limited-edition menu items, Raising Cane’s is sticking to its guns. It offers one finger and one sauce—no more.

“I’m always asked if I plan to add anything to the menu, and the answer is always no,” Graves told me. “You don’t need to be all things to all people, and too often brands are chasing trends or limited-time offerings that distract their crew from focusing on what made them successful to begin with.”

In some ways, Cane’s is winning the chicken wars by not really fighting them at all. The menu, embracing its red-hued simplicity, almost reads as a rebuke to its competitors. It’s essentially just the chicken listed in different quantities: basket of fingers, box of fingers, finger sandwich (in some places), or a single-finger add-on. Dave’s Hot Chicken has adopted a similar premise for its spicier entry into the market, but for many Caniacs, nothing beats the stripped-down glory of the original.

The Cane’s menu, featuring various chicken-finger combos. Raising Cane’s

Is there a downside to this approach? Ari Felhandler, an analyst for the research firm Morningstar focusing on the food and drink industries, said that although keeping the menu tight allows costs to remain low and operations to remain relatively streamlined, it may also prevent the brand from remaining agile to meet constantly changing consumer tastes and avoid potential disruptions to its supply chain.

“We think the firm’s concentration may also limit its ability to penetrate markets as deeply as more diversified peers like McDonald’s,” Felhandler said.

Indeed, every fast-food brand is trying to find a new, louder way into the game. This year, Taco Bell released the limited-run Diablo Dusted Crispy Chicken Nuggets, and there are rumors that the chain is quietly testing out a Chicken Caesar Dorito Burrito, all in an attempt to get a little bit of real estate in the chicken sphere. Even though it has been known for burgers since it opened in the 1940s, McDonald’s has seen its chicken fare generate sales commensurate with beef, at about $25 billion in 2023, CEO Christopher Kempczinski said during a fourth-quarter earnings call. The chain rolled out three new chicken items at the end of last year, including permanently bringing back the Y2K-era McCrispy Strips.

Graves, for his part, seemed unmoved by all this when we spoke. Perhaps because he has something better than Diablo Dust.

At the Raising Cane’s in Times Square, it felt like being inside a very red megachurch. Pushing through the glass double doors, I found every inch of the restaurant pulsating with some kind of sensory experience. Oversized disco balls hung overhead, casting flecks of light onto the couches, which were shaped like the brand’s beloved Texas toast. The rest of the ceiling was lined in a digital screen displaying a close-up of fried chicken, and the walls were lit up with electric signs reading things like “Caniac Corner” and the brand’s motto, “One Love.”

Every single Formica-topped table was packed to the brim. A thick queue of customers waited for the self-order kiosks. At least 20 more crowded by the pickup stand. Gaggles of British tourists with fur coats and spray tans jostled for seating, clutching their outerwear to their chests for space as they scouted for a table to open up. One man pushed past me with a backpack, shouting agitatedly about fried chicken.

After several rounds of prowling, three friends and I managed to grab a table at the front, right by the DJ booth, which was blaring every single Top 40 song from 2016 in succession, including three Ed Sheeran club remixes. The DJ was silhouetted by a large window display of a gigantic, human-sized plastic re-creation of Raising Cane’s chicken tenders and crinkle-cut fries being dipped into a tub of Cane’s Sauce. I heard, in preparation for this story, that the DJ occasionally requests that visitors form a conga Iine. I eyed him suspiciously. It was 5 p.m. on a weekday.

“Raising Cane’s is a step above other fast-food chicken forms,” one friend explained to me, a non-Caniac, over his three-finger combo. “The quality of the chicken is way better, so it’s worth it to spend a little more than you would at, like, a McDonald’s. It’s just not the same experience.”

Being a Cane’s newbie, I felt dubious about this pitch. How different can a chicken finger actually be? But seeing the chicken in front of me, I had to admit that it really didn’t seem like the same experience at all. The chicken is visually distinct from what I’ve historically known a chicken tender to look like. Mostly: It’s really wet. My friend held up a chicken finger for me to inspect. It was almost limp with moisture, and there was an obvious contrast between where the breading ended and the chicken began. Unlike a McNugget or a chicken fry, both of which are primarily taut pieces of dry stuff that exist as vehicles for sauce, the Cane’s version is obviously and unmistakably chicken. The meat was so glistening that it caught the light of the disco ball. It tore easily into pieces.

I took a bite of the buttery Texas toast and the crinkle-cut fries, then dipped them into the creamy, peppery Cane’s Sauce, which tasted something like pickled ranch. Fat and salt. But it really is that chicken. Especially in this setting, the fingers here just feel posher than other fast food (that is, if you consider eating fried chicken under a gigantic disco ball to be posh).

Yes, Raising Cane’s is somewhat more expensive than other brands. Three combo meals and an additional drink ran my group about $50. A three-finger meal for $12.39 feels relatively steep in the reenergized era of the value menu. I asked my panel of chicken eaters if that was too expensive for fast food.

“You need to think about this in relation to the other fast-food places,” one of my friends argued. “Think about what the chicken is usually like at other chains—the nuggets and tenders and stuff. Imagine that’s all that’s in your area. You don’t have a Cane’s near you. And then it finally opens, you go try it out, and you taste this.”

Right now, there’s a halo of rarity around Raising Cane’s due to its newness, which likely adds to the psychosis. For reference, as of this March, there were 953 Cane’s locations nationwide, as opposed to 2,361 Wingstop locations and 3,413 Chick-fil-A locations. And those numbers pale in comparison to more-ubiquitous quick-service brands like McDonald’s, which operates 13,827 locations across the country, or Starbucks, with 16,875. In the same way that regional brands like Shake Shack and In-N-Out have maintained cult followings for their novelty, Cane’s has no doubt benefited from the same kind of rarefied air.

Even my chicken-tasting panel had thoughts about what constitutes an actual Cane’s. “The real Raising Cane’s experience is in the suburbs,” a friend declared. Another nodded. “You have to imagine that you just finished volleyball practice and the JV squad is having a horrendous season to really get the full picture.” Everyone solemnly agreed.

It won’t be long before that’s not true, though. Raising Cane’s is one of the fastest-growing quick-service restaurants in the country. Graves told me he plans to continue expanding nationwide, and even across the world. The chain opened seven new locations in May, 12 in June, five in July, and seven in August. Aggressive expansions typically come with plenty of risk: an immediate strain on resources, profit instability, and possibly outgrowing the existing business model. But the reason to keep on growing is clear. Cane’s is having a moment, and the chain doesn’t want to miss it.

The chain also leans into the hype of new locations. It raffles off free Cane’s for a year to a “Lucky 20” customers who show up within the first few hours of an opening, offering Caniacs another reason to camp outside in the parking lot. Of course, there’s the DJs and giveaways, plus prizes for the first visitors in line. It’s the gift that keeps on giving: They stoke the flames, and the flames reward them back. Local news coverage and social media posts about the lines, traffic, and campers get the Cane’s name in front of plenty of people who would’ve never heard about the chain in the first place. (For her part, Barrera, in Grand Rapids, told me she ultimately found the chaos at the store opening a little disconcerting—but she kept vlogging all the same.)

It’s an aggressive expansion tactic, but it works, and the chain is able to do it probably because it’s still privately owned. “Cane’s is one of few founder-led companies of its size,” Graves said. “It’s important to me and my family to be involved in every aspect of the business, and I want our customers to know that.”

Chicken fingers and crinkle fries with dipping sauce. Noam Galai/Getty Images for Raising Cane’s

Felhandler, the analyst, agreed that because Cane’s doesn’t have to answer to shareholders, that likely allows it to adapt more quickly to the market, a crucial ability in a competitive landscape desperate to meet fickle consumer tastes as quickly as possible. He added that franchise-heavy chains often struggle because the hundreds to thousands of independent owners don’t always agree with corporate leadership on things like menu prices, labor practices, and operations standards.

It’s clear that Raising Cane’s leadership is aware of these advantages, as it has zero intentions of going public in the near future. “We use a traditional line of credit to be able to fund our growth and have the capital that is needed to grow our business,” co-CEO AJ Kumaran told CNBC. “We take a very long-term viewpoint in the business, and we have no interest in going public or taking private investments.”

In other words, for now Caniacs are safe in their chicken-finger fiefdom, free from gimmicks in their food—save those for the DJ booth. What happens in the coming years remains to be seen. As Graves is well aware, the flock will be watching.

Despite Raising Cane’s measured approach, the real engine of its recent success may be outside the restaurant entirely.

Two British girls standing outside the restaurant in New York, surrounded by all their check-in suitcases on the hot concrete sidewalk, told me they had just landed in the U.S. for a summer camp in Pennsylvania, but that they first went to visit their brother, who had been in the city for three weeks. He had already gone to Cane’s three times.

There’s a palpable sugar high that has spread throughout the Cane’s brand and its customers. And that has played out online. The clicky videos, the snaking lines of customers, the grandiose launch parties—it echoes similar consumer hype trends of the past, like McDonald’s hyperviral Travis Scott Meal or infamous Rick and Morty–fueled Szechuan Sauce incident. Like many other internet-fueled food crazes, Cane’s enthusiasm often spills offline in surprisingly tangible ways. Fans trade tips in online communities and treat new locations as pilgrimages.

The craze is reflected on social media, where fried chicken has had a renaissance. Mukbangers, content creators who eat grotesque amounts of food on camera, frequently feature fried chicken. They crunch into every flavor of Wingstop and rack up millions of views; they clean Korean fried chicken drums in one fell bite, without leaving a trace of meat on the bone. And, notably, they eat Cane’s, whether it’s buying entire orders of just Texas toast or dunking their entire hand into a fountain cup of Cane’s Sauce and licking it off their fingers.

Viral marketing has been a core part of Raising Cane’s success. Sure, celebrities often partner with fast-food restaurants to release collaboration meal deals, but Cane’s A-listers also seem to evangelize the brand itself. There’s Cardi B using Raising Cane’s moisturizing sauce in her skin care routine. There’s Ice-T giving out iced tea at the Times Square location. Love Island USA star Olandria Carthen walked the Raising Cane’s runway during New York Fashion Week in a Caniac-red gown designed by influencer Joe Ando-Hirsh.

Graves is a regular face in all of this, going on beloved YouTube shows like Mythical Kitchen and hanging out with the likes of Glen Powell on camera, all in the name of Cane’s. He positions himself as a guy who wants to have a good time and who throws tentpole pop-culture events. It’s rare to see a fast-food CEO as public as Graves is—that can be risky, as the McDonald’s CEO can attest—but it’s another way the company is meeting its customers where they are. Although other CEOs have historically remained in the shadows, Graves is often splashed all over the brand pages. (To be fair, co-CEO Kumaran is rarely seen on the company TikTok page, and only Graves spoke with me for this piece.)

“When I first started Raising Cane’s in 1996, we obviously didn’t have social media, but once I started to learn how to leverage it in a way that was authentic and genuine, that was a true unlock,” Graves said. “I have a lot of celebrity friends, and we’re always partnering with them around peak cultural moments, whether that be the Super Bowl, Winter Olympics, the drop of a new album, or anything in between.”

Graves said that no one believed in this business model when he first set out to open his restaurant. “I had this idea for a restaurant that focused on just that, and when I put it into a business plan in college, it actually got the lowest grade in the class,” he said. “I was told it wouldn’t work, but that just made me more determined to prove that a focused concept would work.”

Despite some critics, it’s clear that so far he’s been right. “It’s deeply personal to me,” Graves said. “I always say I believe that God made me good at chicken fingers to help people. I know it sounds crazy, but it’s true.”

Melting on the sidewalk of Midtown Manhattan, sipping an iced sweet tea that tourists have taken 16-hour flights to try, I watched the hordes of tourists push their shopping and suitcases through the heavy glass doors, immediately enamored by the dulcet tones of EDM Ed Sheeran. Maybe this does help them somehow. I certainly felt different in there.

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newyorker.com The Mystery of Dark Oxygen James Dinneen 17–21 minutes

In March, I accompanied an international team of scientists on an expedition to one of the deepest places that humans have ever visited, a few hours outside Johannesburg, South Africa. Before sunrise, we drove to the entrance of the Moab Khotsong gold-and-uranium mine, joining a line of workers who were relieving the night shift. Security was tight; for years, mining companies have struggled to keep out illegal miners called zama-zamas, who sneak underground and collect ore at great danger to themselves. When guards finally cleared us and our gear, we walked through rotating gates into what resembled a suburban office park. At its center was a boxy concrete tower—a mine shaft that would carry us nearly two miles down into the earth.

The scientists had come not for precious metals but for something even more elusive: what they call dark oxygen. On Earth’s surface, plants and algae produce plentiful oxygen from sunlight and water, allowing us to live and breathe. At one time, scientists didn’t think that significant quantities of free oxygen, or O2, would be found anywhere else on the planet, in part because O2 reacts aggressively with other elements. “O2 is way less abundant in the universe than diamond,” Emil Ruff, a microbial ecologist and the expedition lead for the trip, told me. But, over the past few years, small quantities of free oxygen have been detected in a range of deep places, far removed from the light of the sun. Ruff and his colleagues hoped to collect new samples of ancient water in the mine. They suspected that oxygen was playing an unrecognized role in powering underground life.

We were issued boots, helmets, and reflective coveralls strongly reminiscent of the music video for the Beastie Boys song “Intergalactic.” So costumed, we passed through another checkpoint, into a room filled with headlamps and emergency oxygen packs. A poster on the wall explained what to do in the event of a cave-in: pull a tab to inflate a bag with a few crucial minutes of breathable air. “We’re embarrassingly dependent on oxygen,” Karen Lloyd, a University of Southern California biogeochemist, who was there to research how underground microbes respond to seismic activity, said. Many of the subsurface microorganisms she studies don’t breathe oxygen, as we do, instead using sulfur or iron compounds that leach from the rock to drive their metabolism.

Once everyone was suited up, we clambered into a three-story-tall lift called the Cage, which ferries thousands of workers up and down the shaft each day. I tried not to think about the void—seven times the height of the Empire State Building—beneath us. If we fell in, I calculated, a full minute would pass before we hit the bottom. The operator pulled down a gate with a clang, plunging us into darkness. We began to drop.

Enterprising scientists have been conducting research in Moab Khotsong for many years, but the mine became particularly valuable to biologists after an earthquake struck nearby in 2014. A group of Japanese geoscientists soon started drilling toward the fault line under the shaft. After half a mile, extremely salty radioactive water started flowing out of the borehole. This water, in turn, attracted researchers who investigate the deep biosphere—the poorly understood microbial ecosystems in the earth’s crust—which has been estimated to contain ten to fifty per cent of the biomass on Earth. Tullis C. Onstott, the late Princeton geobiologist who authored “Deep Life: The Hunt for the Hidden Biology of Earth, Mars, and Beyond,” told colleagues that he’d spent twenty-five years searching for water like what was found in Moab Khotsong. “It’s totally separate from the surface world,” Thomas Kieft, a microbiologist who worked with Onstott, told me. “It’s totally separate from photosynthesis.”

Geochemical measurements suggested that the water had been separated from the surface for at least 1.2 billion years—more than a quarter of Earth’s history, since before animals and plants existed. Yet it turned out to be full of life. Onstott and his colleagues showed that slow-growing cells in the brine fed on hydrogen molecules, which were produced when radioactivity split water into its constituent “H”s and “O”s. The team also found hints that oxygen was present in the brine, and even a bit of genetic evidence to suggest that underground microbes might be capable of using it. But oxygen was never the focus of their research, because deep, dark environments are usually assumed to be oxygen-free zones.

Then, while working with the government of Canada to monitor groundwater, in 2023, Ruff and his colleagues detected O2 in deep wells beneath Alberta. This was very odd. Much of this oxygen had not come from the atmosphere, and there was no sunlight or plant life down there to produce it. Any stray O2 molecules should have been quickly gobbled up by chemical reactions with rocks and fluids, or by microbes. “Nobody in their right mind would look at ancient groundwater and think, Let’s look at oxygen,” Ruff told me. “But we found it accumulating.”

The implications were electrifying. O2 is the essential ingredient in the chemistry of large and complex life-forms. It’s what’s known as an electron acceptor, which means that it steals electrons from other compounds. When we light a fire, O2 steals electrons from the fuel, releasing heat. When we eat food, O2 steals electrons from sugars and fats, releasing energy that powers our bodies. No other compound can unlock as much energy—and any creature that goes without O2 has to make do with less. (Ruff quoted the Nobel Prize-winning biochemist Albert Szent-Györgyi: “Life is nothing but an electron trying to find a place to rest.”)

If such a useful molecule was abundant underground, the researchers reasoned, then the deep biosphere might be even more diverse and widespread than expected. And whatever was generating dark oxygen might also be found on planets or moons beyond Earth. “We started digging,” Ruff told me. His team soon discovered trace amounts of oxygen in deep groundwater from around the world. They found DNA from aerobes—microbes capable of using oxygen—in places that sunlight could never reach. Other microbes seemed to produce their own dark oxygen, perhaps to extract energy from hydrocarbons such as methane, much as drag racers inject nitrous oxide into their engines to boost horsepower. Last year, Ruff and five other investigators won a multimillion-dollar grant from NASA to extend their investigations on a sort of dark-oxygen world tour. Moab Khotsong was their first and deepest stop.

Once the Cage was moving at full speed, it raced down the shaft at nearly forty miles an hour. It was a remarkably smooth ride, apart from a faint rattle and whoosh each time we passed an underground level. Our ears popped; the researchers chuckled nervously. Cool water began to drip from the ceiling. Finally, about four thousand feet below the surface, the lift slowed at our first stop.

Before we could visit the super-salty radioactive brine at the bottom of the mine, we had to collect a baseline sample of groundwater that was not a billion-plus years old. We exited the Cage, ducking through a curtain of falling water, into a high tunnel. No natural rock was visible here; the passageway had been plastered over with mottled concrete and lined with air pipes. It smelled of rotten eggs and concrete dust. At first glance, it seemed utterly devoid of life.

Bennie Liebenberg, a former geologist at the mine who was serving as our guide, has the plodding, slightly wide-eyed manner of someone who has spent a lot of time underground. He previously facilitated the drilling of the borehole after the earthquake, and has been the mine’s liaison with scientists ever since, helping convince higher-ups that the chance to solve profound environmental mysteries was worth the occasional disruption to mining operations. In his office, he keeps a copy of “Deep Life” that Onstott inscribed: “You have been a blessing to our cause. Eternally grateful.”

Liebenberg led us to a wall where water was gushing out of orange pipes. It had been flowing this way since the shaft was drilled, decades earlier. “They tried to seal it, but couldn’t,” he said, in a clipped Afrikaans accent. The water here was shallow enough to have been connected with surface flows tens of thousands of years ago, and it still contained oxygen. Thus, it would give the scientists a point of comparison with the billion-year-old brine below. Before the researchers could start sampling it, though, a deafening roar suddenly filled the tunnel. Scott Wankel, the team’s lead geochemist and a researcher at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (W.H.O.I.), had accidentally kicked a tiny hole in a rusty pipe of compressed air. (“You broke the fucking mine, dude!” Ruff joked later; Liebenberg seemed unconcerned.)

We had earplugs, thankfully, but we were no longer able to speak. Instead, for several hours, the scientists mimed awkwardly as they collected samples: No, I don’t need that small bottle, I need the slightly smaller one! Eventually, someone realized that we could write notes to one another, which helped move things along. Lloyd, the U.S.C. geobiologist, gestured for me to give her my notebook.

“Did you see the sulfur streamers?” she wrote. I shook my head. She waved me over to a gutter where tufts of blue-gray fibres were fluttering in mine water. “They are giant filaments of sulfide oxidizing bacteria,” she wrote on pages that were getting increasingly wet. Apparently, some bacteria were using oxygen in the tunnel to metabolize sulfur compounds in the water, and that was producing the rotten-egg smell. Single-celled organisms ganged up in filaments, by the tens of millions, to avoid being carried away by the flow.

Under another water pipe, Ranjani Murali, a biochemist who was co-leading the expedition, found a film of even larger streamers, along with what appeared to be orange-colored sulfide-oxidizing bacteria. Sujung Lim, who works in Murali’s lab at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, wiggled her body as though she were a streamer to alert everyone to a cluster that she’d found. Meanwhile, at the other end of the tunnel, Ruff reached a gloved hand into several inches of underwater microbial ooze. Mops of ghostly streamers, some of them longer than my arm, were waving like tentacles atop layers of black muck. When we were back in the quiet of the Cage, he said with a grin: “It was like a kombucha!”

A space that had appeared dead and artificial was actually teeming with microorganisms. According to the scientists, the oxygen we were breathing was helping them thrive. In the same way that oxygen helps a fire burn hotter, it was enabling these microbes to unlock energy from sulfur and iron compounds in the water. That’s why the bacteria could multiply to the point that they were visible to the naked eye. But the oxygen here wasn’t a natural resource—it was cycled into the shaft so that miners (and the occasional geobiologist) could breathe. The question remained whether oxygen, a sort of rocket fuel for life, might also be available far deeper in the rock.

The next day, we crowded back into the Cage, this time joined by about thirty mine workers who were descending to “the deep level.” When I told a fellow named David that I was impressed by the sheer scale of the mine, he nodded and replied, “There is life underground!” Others chatted nonchalantly in Zulu and Xhosa. This time, the lift sped nearly two miles into the earth. At the deep level, we climbed out and saw several long tunnels that radiate out from the shaft. We were now deeper than anyone on the team had ever been—even Ruff, who had visited deep-sea hydrothermal vents in the Gulf of California. “I’m closer to the center of the earth here than I was in the submarine,” he said.

After a few minutes of waiting around, Liebenberg informed us that an underground train wasn’t working, so we’d have to walk the rest of the way. We tramped for about a mile, sweating in heat that emanated from the rock, until we turned onto a smaller passageway. Two workers walked past. “Morning,” one said cheerily.

After another half mile, we finally reached a dead end, where the concrete walls gave way to natural rock—the gold-flecked quartzite of the Witwatersrand Basin, which is more than two billion years old. Another half mile beneath us were the water-filled fractures opened by the earthquake, which Liebenberg had dubbed the Onstott dike. Two pipes protruded from the wall; beneath one of them, the rock glistened with crystallized salt and orange-colored microbial mats. The whole site looked to be in desperate need of a plumber. Wankel, from W.H.O.I., quipped, “We’ve come all this way—for this.”

The researchers got to work. Wankel turned a valve, and billion-year-old brine sputtered out of one of the pipes. Emeline Vidal, who works in Ruff’s lab, was able to fill up several containers before the water pressure ran down; she planned to sequence DNA from any cells that were present. Wankel focussed on filling airtight cannisters without letting any gases escape; he moved as gingerly as if he were opening a shaken-up can of soda. “It smells less like sulfur and more like fart,” Ruff observed. David Bekaert, another geochemist on the team, used a seventy-thousand-dollar mass spectrometer to find a scientific explanation: there was methane in the water, likely a signature of microbes eating hydrogen and CO2.

The whole group gathered around as Carolina Fernandes Moreira de Carvalho, another biogeochemist, took a preliminary measure of O2 dissolved in the water. Lit by the circle of headlamps, she held a hypersensitive oxygen probe up to the borehole. Brine filtered through it and filled up a bottle. After a minute, the reading from the probe levelled out, and Fernandes read out the number: 0.09 micromoles per litre. This was an extremely small amount of oxygen—maybe two hundredths of what you’d find in a glass of drinking water—and it would need to be confirmed. But down here, in waters that had been trapped in darkness since before the dawn of plants, there shouldn’t have been any oxygen at all.

A few months after leaving the mine, I called Ruff. He had undertaken the expedition as a scientist at the Marine Biological Laboratory, on Cape Cod, but now he was teaching at the University of Bremen, in Germany. His team had confirmed that dark oxygen was “a feature of this ecosystem,” he told me. But it might take years of laboratory work to figure out whether biology or radioactivity was most responsible for creating it, and how any microbes might be using it. The weight of the oxygen atoms, for example, would clarify their origins; the team would use that data, in combination with measures from other underground sites, to estimate the over-all amount of O2 available in the deep biosphere.

Still, the researchers were excited. In Las Vegas, Murali and Lim had started a slow process of trying to grow cells from the brine in the laboratory. Vidal, in Woods Hole, had bags of DNA samples on ice, ready to be sequenced. Ruff was permitting himself to imagine animals living off of dark oxygen in new and surprising places. In 2011, Onstott’s team had discovered that, as deep as 2.2 miles into a South African mine, a previously unknown species of nematode was feeding on waterborne bacteria. They named it Halicephalobus mephisto—the devil worm. Maybe dark oxygen would allow for other multicellular creatures to lurk even deeper in the rock.

Ruff and the team were careful not to speculate too much, however, in part because of a dark-oxygen controversy that has been swirling around a different part of the planet: the deep ocean. In 2024, a group of scientists reported that lumps of metal on the Pacific seafloor—which happened to be the target of seabed-mining operations—seemed to be producing dark oxygen. Many of the resulting news stories, in Ruff’s view, wrongly credited the metal lumps with oxygenating the atmosphere or helping give rise to life. “It was crazy,” Ruff said of the media coverage. “Everyone was talking about it.” Andrew Sweetman, the Scottish marine biogeochemist who led the work, hadn’t made such claims, but he was still pilloried by fellow-scientists, and proponents of mining accused him of being an anti-mining crusader. (Later this year, Sweetman and his colleagues will revisit the Pacific on a follow-up expedition.)

New insights into dark oxygen really could revise the story of life, according to researchers who were not a part of Ruff’s expedition. If dark oxygen keeps turning up in unlikely places, that “probably means that the deep biosphere is more extensive than we thought previously, and has even more cells than we thought,” Devan Nisson, a NASA geobiologist who, as Onstott’s last doctoral student, spearheaded much of the early research at Moab Khotsong, said. The same could be true beyond Earth: access to dark oxygen could enable organisms to survive in shockingly radioactive or salty habitats. “I think that dark-oxygen production—whether biotic or abiotic—will unlock zones of habitability we previously thought beyond that fringe of biology,” Nisson said.

Another big question, back on Earth, is what role dark oxygen may have played in the evolution of aerobes—living things that breathe oxygen, like us. In a recent analysis of bacterial genomes, Murali and her colleagues concluded that some aerobes existed before the dawn of photosynthesis. This was on Ruff’s mind as we left the mine together, huffing and puffing on our way back to the Cage. It’s conceivable, he told me, that aerobic respiration was originally a kind of “freak metabolism” that took advantage of dark oxygen generated by radioactive rocks. When photosynthetic microbes began filling the atmosphere with oxygen, about 2.4 billion years ago—a development that would have been deadly for many other organisms—such aerobes would have been ready. It’s even possible that they are ancestors of oxygen breathers like us. If so, then dark oxygen might not be some kind of subterranean aberration. It might be a starting point for life as we know it. ♦

scientificamerican.com 388 years ago, Galileo worked out why human giants can't exist—and explained a law of nature Joel David Hamkins 10–12 minutes

Acording to legend, giants once roamed the Earth. In Homer’s Odyssey, Odysseus encounters the Cyclops, the one-eyed son of Poseidon, living in a huge cavern, hungry and angry. He grasps men and sheep in one hand, devouring them whole. In the days of King Arthur, a clever young boy earned the title of “Jack the Giant Killer,” using his sharp wit to outsmart and slay the various “giants” plaguing the land. Another Jack—or perhaps it is the same Jack—famously plants some magic beans and climbs the resulting beanstalk to a castle in the clouds, cleverly outwitting the giant residing there.

All these giants of legend have a humanoid form, and they undertake generally human activities—walking, stomping, dancing, carrying heavy loads, running, and so forth. They act and move about in a human manner, only at a larger scale. But if human giants did exist, could they actually survive in this form?

In his foundational 1638 text “Dialogues Concerning Two New Sciences,” Galileo Galilei argues that this folklore understanding of the nature of giants is fundamentally flawed. He contends that this idea of a massive humanlike creature is, quite simply, physically impossible.

To begin his argument, Galileo asks us to imagine a structural beam of sturdy oak. The beam might be used to support a heavy load—perhaps a load of bricks or a great stone.

He then asks us to imagine a much larger oak beam, scaled up in size but with the same proportions and material. A thicker, solid oak beam, of course, will naturally support more than a slender beam of the same wood. But how much more can it support? Will the larger beam be able to support the same load, but also scaled up in size? Should we expect the larger beam to support a scaled-up load of bricks or a scaled-up stone?

Galileo ingeniously argues no—the larger beam will not support a similarly scaled-up load. Indeed, he claims that at a certain sufficient scale, the beam will no longer support even its own weight! His argument relies on a certain subtle observation concerning how scaling works in different dimensions.

Galileo first observes that the load-bearing strength of a beam depends on its cross-sectional area, since a failure of the beam involves it breaking across a cross section. Since area scales as the square of the linear factor, a 10-times larger beam—with length, width, and depth each scaled by a factor of 10—will have a cross-sectional area 100 times larger than before. In other words, a 10-times larger beam is 100 times stronger! It will be able to support 100 times the load as the smaller beam.

That may seem initially very good. But the problem is that the weight of the load, for a given material density, is determined by its volume, and volume scales with the cube of the linear factor. Scaling up a load of bricks or a great stone by a linear factor of 10, therefore, will cause a 1,000-fold increase in the volume—a 10-times larger stone weighs 1,000 times more.

Galileo brings these observations to their natural collision. A 10-times-larger beam is 100 times stronger, yes, but the similarly scaled-up load became 1,000 times heavier. If the smaller beam had been carrying the optimal load, therefore, then the scaled-up beam would not be able to support the scaled-up load—not even close! It would support only one-tenth of it. Galileo argues that any given beam will have a certain sufficiently scaled-up size at which it will no longer support even its own weight. The strength of the beam scales with the square, but the mass of the beam itself scales with the cube, so at a sufficient scale, the beam will simply be too heavy for its own strength.

Now back to giants. Picture the bones of a giant serving, in effect, as structural “beams” supporting its body mass, its flesh, and muscles. If the giant’s bones are made of the same stuff as ordinary men, his strength has not scaled the same as his mass.

The conclusion, Galileo writes, is catastrophic for the giant:

Clearly then if one wishes to maintain in a great giant the same proportion of limb as that found in an ordinary man he must either find a harder and stronger material for making the bones, or he must admit a diminution of strength in comparison with men of medium stature; for if his height be increased inordinately he will fall and be crushed under his own weight.

Similarly, scaled-up versions of wooden ladders would not support a scaled-up giant human climbing them; scaled-up swords would be too heavy for such giants to lift; scaled-up armor would be too heavy to wear; scaled-up wooden houses would not support their own roofs; a scaled-up wooden chair would not support even itself, let alone a giant sitting in it; and scaled-up dining glasses would be too weak to hold the volume of wine or water within them. In short, the entire world of giants as pictured in folklore does not fully make physical sense.

While Galileo’s argument explains the nonexistence of human giants, it also explains the existence of nature. Namely, of animals such as hippopotamuses, rhinoceroses, elephants, and dinosaurs, which tend (or tended) to be stocky, with proportionally thicker, sturdier bones than smaller animals.

Elephants, for example, have much thicker legs relative to their size than do dogs and cats. This is explained by Galileo’s observation that the strength of bones scales with the square of the linear scale, since it depends on the cross-sectional area of the bones (and perhaps the pulling strength of muscles also depends on cross-sectional area), but the weight of the animal scales with the cube. So, the bones themselves need to become proportionally thicker to support the increased weight.

A dual effect occurs when scaling down in size. Very small animals, for example, are typically slender and lithe. Insects tend to have relatively thin limbs, which would be entirely inadequate to support the animal if scaled up proportionally to a much larger size. Unlike humans, small insects can often jump many times their own height. Insects can walk on walls and ceilings—they weigh so little, in fact, that electrostatic forces are strong enough to hold them fast to the surface.

If one were to encounter a fly that was 10-times normal size, but with the same proportions and body design, it would weigh 1,000 times as much, and the tiny electrostatic forces would be insufficient to allow it to stick to walls. It would certainly not be able to fly, and probably it could not even support itself standing on those toothpick legs. Water bugs can walk on the surface of water, because at that scale, the surface tension of the water is proportionally strong enough to support the meager mass, but larger bugs would be too heavy. The laws of physics and the basic nature of chemical and physical reality simply do not scale uniformly with size.

Galileo’s paradox applies just as much to the folklore conception of the miniature human, such as with the Lilliputians or the Hollywood films Downsizing, Ant-Man, or Honey, I Shrunk the Kids! The Lilliputians of “Gulliver’s Travels,” for instance, are about six inches tall, and the bones of such a 10-times scaled-down human would be 100 times weaker, while weighing 1,000 times less. Such a person would therefore not walk about normally but could probably jump very high (relative to his or her height) and carry correspondingly huge loads. For example, at normal size, a human can often carry another human on his or her back, but not much more. But the one-tenth-size humans, as Galileo notes, would be able to carry much more:

Whereas, if the size of a body be diminished, the strength of that body is not diminished in the same proportion; indeed the smaller the body the greater its relative strength. Thus a small dog could probably carry on his back two or three dogs of his own size; but I believe that a horse could not carry even one of his own size.

Meanwhile, however, the tiny humans would find themselves subject to all manner of forces that are more prominent at small scale. They would stick to walls and other things more easily because of the electrostatic forces, and water would be a big problem, seeming much stickier at small scale. In short, the folklore vision of Lilliputians or other tiny humans walking about as humans ordinarily do is fundamentally flawed and ultimately just as physically impossible as giants are.

Galileo’s observations enable us to see easily how evolutionary forces might work on body size. Perhaps for some organisms, there are comparatively few genes that control the overall body size in such a way that the typical size of an animal will be subject to evolutionary forces of natural selection.

We have clear evidence of species of animals greatly changing in size over evolutionary time scales. Early mammals were very small. For example, horses used to be about the size of small dogs — and a vestige of this can be seen today in the miniature horse breeds. Many insects, by contrast, were larger. Before dinosaurs and birds, dragonflies had wingspans of several feet, while we’ve found fossils of cockroaches up to four inches long. But the body shapes are not simply scaled exactly up and down. Evolutionary forces have acted on these body-size plans over time to improve survival, performing an optimizing arbitrage for the comparative advantages available in each size.

Galileo glimpsed a subtle, secret aspect of our physical existence: He perceived the core dimensional nature of important features such as strength and mass, realizing as a purely mathematical consequence that these features will therefore scale differently in those different dimensions. So despite the enormous range of sizes available in the physical universe, our lives would not be the same at a different scale. Giants are impossible. The Lilliputians are to be found only in literature. And as for humans, there is a very good reason we are the size we are.

This story was republished from the MIT Press Reader. Read the original article.

The Magnetophon was a high-fidelity reel-to-reel magnetic tape recorder. The hit of the Berlin Radio Show when it debuted in 1935, it was developed by the German electronics manufacturer AEG. The magnetic tape was produced by I.G. Farben (now known as BASF).

Where's Rocketman when you need him!? What??.... He is 'too diffuse and mixed up to be harnessable by the machines anymore? What the hell kind of answer is that?'

I stare at the phone in confusion.

SIGNAL TO NOISE RATIO the phone squawks in an exasperated exclamation in a foreign language back.

link to open access paper https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2603077123

DAS is a fiber-optic measurement technique that uses coherent Rayleigh backscattering to record strain along the fiber with high spatial and temporal resolution. The method is based on phase measurements of the Rayleigh backscattering to capture the strain field along a fiber at timescales controlled by the kilohertz laser pulse repetition rate (12). DAS has traditionally been used to study high-frequency signals (4, 13, 14). More recent work has demonstrated that it can also resolve significantly lower-frequency variations (15–17).

In the marine environment, low-frequency strain variations (0.01 to 0.1 Hz) may arise from a range of physical mechanisms, including hydrodynamic processes associated with moving objects. The displacement of water generated by moving whales and ships induces a moving hydrodynamic pressure field that extends through the water column, dynamically loading and unloading the seafloor. This varying pressure field causes the seafloor sediments to deform both vertically and laterally. When the fiber is buried in sediments, the DAS system primarily records the resulting lateral deformation of the surrounding material. Hydrodynamic pressure fluctuations produced by ocean waves have already been extensively studied (18–21). However, for more detailed characterization of pressure signals, dedicated pressure sensors are often employed. For example, Stenvold et al. (22) demonstrated that high-precision seabed pressure sensors can detect subtle pressure variations, highlighting their potential for hydrocarbon reservoir monitoring. Related studies have also explored acoustic and hydrodynamic signals generated by moving objects. Hegna (23) investigated how acoustic wavefields generated by moving vessels, recorded by towed streamers or ocean-bottom sensors, can be used to image the subsurface. Another study by Werner and Landrø (24) investigated the hydrodynamic pressure field generated by a buoy moving through the water column, while Scarpa et al. (25) used pressure sensors to measure ship wakes in Venice, Italy, and assess their impact on the lagoon.

The pressure field associated with ship-generated Kelvin wakes typically contains frequencies between 0.1 and 0.4 Hz (26–28). Buisman and Thiem (29) investigate hydrodynamic signals from ships recorded with different DAS configurations in both very shallow and deeper water settings, down to 58 m. In very shallow water, they report low-frequency signals attributed to ship wakes, including contributions from bow and stern waves within the Kelvin wake system. In deeper water, they observe even lower-frequency signals, which they describe more generally as “ship-induced water waves,” without drawing a firm conclusion on whether these arise from the Kelvin wake or from other displacement-driven processes. In this study, we present observations of ship- and whale-generated signals from a DAS installation in Svalbard, where the recorded signatures fall within the same low-frequency band as those observed in the deeper-water setting of Buisman and Thiem. Building on these earlier observations, we introduce a theoretical framework that explains the origin of these signals.

cross-posted from: https://sh.itjust.works/post/64302418

More long-form Admiral Cloudberg articles found here.

cross-posted from: https://startrek.website/post/42560972

https://web.archive.org/web/20260724020118/https://www.currentaffairs.org/news/debate-me-daddy-confessions-of-a-phone-sex-hotline-operator

cross-posted from: https://sopuli.xyz/post/49188879

An appendix to the letter cited U.S. laws and Administration policies that prohibited the transferring of weapons likely to be used in war crimes, and Spoljaric urged Biden to withhold weapons “that should not be used in densely populated areas, in light of their devastating humanitarian impacts.” She warned Biden that failing to “uphold minimum standards of humanity” would be a “moral defeat” that “future generations are unlikely to forgive us for failing to avert.”

...

Two years after Spoljaric’s letter, President Donald J. Trump ordered the U.S. military to join Israel in attacking Iran. Some former senior officials in the Biden Administration told me that, in certain ways, the war in Iran was an extension of the Gaza conflict. Iran had been central to Biden’s thinking about the Middle East, several top advisers said. He’d feared that any public pressure the U.S. put on Israel—any “daylight” between the allies—could invite attacks by Iran or its Lebanese client, Hezbollah. The U.S. would then be compelled to defend Israel in a regional conflagration. Brett McGurk, Biden’s White House coördinator for the Middle East and probably his most influential adviser, championed this position, arguing that rock-solid support for Israel would help contain Iran, whose proxies killed three U.S. soldiers in the region during the first months of the Gaza conflict.

At the same time, the Biden Administration’s staunch public backing of Israel during the Gaza war had created what Philip Gordon, the national-security adviser to Vice-President Kamala Harris, described to me as a “moral hazard”—it had invited the Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, to try to expand the battle into a regional one. Even though Biden and his advisers privately told Netanyahu many times not to provoke Iran, the Israelis repeatedly blindsided the Americans by doing exactly that: a January, 2024, strike on Damascus killed five senior Iranian military advisers; an April, 2024, strike on an Iranian diplomatic mission in Syria killed more than a dozen; a July, 2024, strike in Tehran assassinated a top Hamas political leader; a September, 2024, operation in Lebanon detonated explosives planted in thousands of walkie-talkies and pagers carried by Hezbollah fighters; a subsequent air strike killed Hezbollah’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah.

Data equity, data justice, and data sovereignty point us toward a fundamentally different approach to civic data. Instead of powerful institutions studying communities and extracting information, communities themselves decide what questions to ask, what information to gather, how to interpret findings, and how data is used. This includes community data—what the Coalition of Communities of Color defines as the qualitative, quantitative, cultural, and place-based knowledge that communities generate and use on their own terms. Examples include stories, maps, oral histories, participatory research, and documentation of lived experiences that traditional data systems often exclude or ignore completely.

So, what happens when communities control their own data? What happens when community members’ realities and lived experiences are at the heart of policymaking and used to drive decision-making?

Alternate site (neither paywalled, the wixsite's font just irritates me): https://redsails.org/creating-the-innocent-killer/

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/48654478

The American bison is the new U.S. national mammal, but its slaughter was once seen as a way to starve Native Americans into submission.

Unpaywalled Link

Paywalled Atlantic Link