Physicists probe validity of Einstein’s gravity on cosmic scales

New tests could verify general theory of relativity, or find flaws

By Tom Siegfried

A century ago, Albert Einstein became famous.

Sure, he was already well-known among physicists. But the world at large learned his name only after November 1919, when news broke that his theory of gravity had been confirmed — to the dismay of many fans of Isaac Newton.

“Lights All Askew in the Heavens” shouted the headline in the New York Times. “Einstein Theory Triumphs,” a subhead added. As the article recounted, an observation of stars near the sun during a solar eclipse found their apparent position shifted just as Einstein had predicted. Newton’s law of gravity, considered inviolable for over two centuries, had been repealed.

But despite the triumph of Einstein’s theory — general relativity — physicists still wonder whether it will someday face the same fate as Newton’s law. While Einstein’s gravity has passed every test so far, nobody knows for sure that it applies everywhere, under all conditions. In particular, there is no guarantee that general relativity reigns over the entire expanse of the cosmos. And several rival theories have been proposed over the years just in case it doesn’t.

After Einstein proposed his new theory, it was mostly ignored for a few decades. But in the last half of the 20th century, general relativity became the theory of the universe. Its equations describe the expansion of the cosmos from its initial high-density, hot big-bang beginning to its current rapidly accelerating expansion. And today general relativity has earned increasing popular notoriety as scientists have verified its more exotic predictions, including black holes and the vibrations in space known as gravitational waves.

But general relativity’s string of successes may not be endless. It’s true that the theory (along with the theory for nature’s three other fundamental forces) describes the observable universe quite well. That description includes massive amounts of invisible mass, known as dark matter, along with a peculiar repulsive force, called dark energy, perfusing all of space. But the dark stuff’s existence is deduced from the assumption that general relativity is correct.

“Given that there is no other (nongravitational) evidence for the dark sector, it is a matter of common sense to question some of the fundamental assumptions that go into the evidence. And the main assumption is that general relativity is the underlying theory of gravity,” astrophysicist Pedro Ferreira of the University of Oxford in England writes in the current Annual Review of Astronomy and Astrophysics. If you don’t assume general relativity is in fact correct, then “evidence for the dark sector may signal a breakdown of general relativity on cosmological scales,” Ferreira points out.

In other words, it’s conceivable that there is no dark stuff. If that’s the case, apparent evidence for its existence might actually be a sign that the true cosmic theory of gravity differs from Einstein’s. If so, the current picture of the cosmos would have to be drastically redrawn.

Still, physicists have plenty of reason for confidence in general relativity’s reliability. For one thing, it solved a knotty problem that had perplexed astronomers about the planet Mercury: a discrepancy in its orbit from that forecast by Newtonian gravity. Einstein announced his theory in 1915 as soon as he was able to show that it correctly predicted Mercury’s actual orbit.

Einstein’s key to solving the Mercury mystery was conceiving gravity as an effect of the geometry of space (or technically, spacetime, since his earlier work had shown space and time to be inseparable). Gravity is not a mutual tug of massive objects, Einstein said, but rather the result of a mass’s distortion of the spacetime surrounding it. Objects orbit or fall into a massive body depending on how strongly the spacetime around it is curved. Rather than responding to some attractive force, masses just follow the contours of spacetime’s geometry.

Gravity as geometry led to the famous prediction verified in the 1919 eclipse. Einstein pointed out that the curvature of spacetime near the sun would cause light from distant stars to bend when passing nearby, changing the stars’ apparent positions as seen from Earth. That prediction inspired an eclipse expedition to the West African island of Principe in May 1919, led by British astrophysicist Arthur Eddington. Eddington’s team found that the positions of several stars were shifted by just the amount that Einstein’s math indicated they should be, and twice as much as Newton’s law predicted. When the eclipse team announced the results in November 1919, one news account heralded them as signaling the need for “a new philosophy of the universe.”

In the century since, Einstein’s gravity has passed many additional tests, such as the spectacular detection of gravitational waves, reported in 2016. But it’s not possible to test the theory under all conceivable conditions. And experts have long suspected that general relativity can’t be right in realms of extremely high mass density. At the center of a black hole, for instance, the theory’s equations no longer make sense, because they imply that matter density would become infinite.

Traveling to the interior of a black hole to test general relativity would be a poor strategy, for many reasons. But scientists staying safely home on Earth can probe realms of fairly strong gravity, possibly offering clues. One project uses a network of telescopes to image the region near the outer edge of a black hole — its “event horizon” (the point of no return for anything falling in). Such images can provide details of how matter flows into the black hole from its “accretion disk,” a ring of orbiting material outside the event horizon.

“By analyzing the structure of the accretion flow,” writes Ferreira, “it will be possible to probe the structure of spacetime … and test whether it is consistent with general relativity.”

Gravitational waves can also provide details of gravity under extreme conditions, as when two black holes collide. Analyzing the spacetime ripples emanating from such collisions could reveal possible flaws in general relativity’s predictions.

If general relativity ever fails, multiple competing gravity theories proposed in recent decades would be waiting in the wings. Most of them boil down to adding a new force to nature’s repertoire of gravity, electromagnetism, and the strong and weak nuclear forces. Apart from gravity, the three other known forces are accurately described by the “standard model,” a set of equations that obey the requirements of quantum mechanics. General relativity does not accommodate the quantum math, though, so a major research effort has long been underway to develop a theory combining gravity and quantum theory.

“Unification of general relativity and quantum physics is widely considered as the most outstanding open problem in fundamental physics,” physicist Abhay Ashtekar of Penn State University said at a recent symposium for science writers.

Such a unifying theory, most experts believe, would entail some sort of modification to general relativity.

One way of modifying the theory would be incorporating a new energy field permeating space. The strength of such a field at different locations could alter general relativity’s predictions for matter’s behavior.

Some theorists have proposed instead that an additional source of spacetime warping — an extra layer of geometry — might be a more fruitful approach. Still other proposals, such as superstring theory, could modify general relativity by allowing more dimensions of space than the three commonly encountered. With some mathematical manipulations, all these approaches amount to adding a fifth force.

So far, tests seeking signs of a new fifth force have found nothing. But those tests have been conducted on relatively small scales (compared with the universe as a whole). It’s possible that general relativity prevails in those tests because other physical effects mask or screen out the deviations that a fifth force would induce. But effects screened out on small scales might be noticeable on large scales, writes Ferreira. “This is uncharted territory and one of the few pristine arenas in which we might find evidence for new physics.”

Another testable tenet of general relativity is its requirement that gravity travels at the speed of light. Gravitational waves provide a way to test that. In 2017, the merger of two neutron stars not only sent gravitational waves to Earth (traversing a distance of 130 million light-years) but also released bursts of electromagnetic radiation, including X-rays and gamma rays, which travel at precisely the same speed as light. Arrival time for the electromagnetic rays and the gravitational waves showed their travel speeds to be identical (within one part in a quadrillion) — ruling out many alternative gravity theories that predicted a difference.

Further such tests, and more refined observations of other cosmological features (such as the remnant microwave background radiation generated when the universe was young), might still someday find flaws in general relativity. If so, some Einstein fans may be disappointed, but most physicists won’t be. They’d relish the excitement of opening a new chapter in the history of physics.

“With the multiple new windows on the gravitational universe…, one would hope that new forces and phenomena are on the verge of discovery,” writes Ferreira. But if Einstein prevails over cosmic distances, Ferreira says, there’s a consolation prize. “In the very least, we will end up with a cast-iron theory for gravity, tested over an enviable range of scales and regimes.”

Tom Siegfried is a science writer and editor in the Washington, DC, area. His latest book, The Number of the Heavens, about the history of the multiverse, was published in September by Harvard University Press.

This article originally appeared in Knowable Magazine, an independent journalistic endeavor from Annual Reviews.

‘Stand your ground’ laws empower armed citizens to defend property with violence – a simple mistake can get you shot, or killed

The door Ralph Yarl mistakenly rang, almost costing the teen his life. AP Photo/Charlie Riede

Caroline Light, Harvard University

In one key respect, Ralph Yarl was fortunate. The wounds the 16-year-old suffered after being shot twice on April 13, 2023, by the owner of the house whose doorbell he rang, thinking it was where he was due to pick up his two younger brothers, did not prove fatal.

Others who have made similar mistakes have died. Take Renisha McBride, who sought help after wrecking her car in a Detroit suburb in 2013, or Carson Senfield, who entered the wrong car in Tampa – thinking it was his Uber – on his 19th birthday. And then there is the case of 20-year-old Kaylin Gillis, a passenger in a car that turned around in a driveway in upstate New York on April 15, 2023. What these young people have in common is that they were killed in accidental encounters with armed property owners.

As a scholar who has studied America’s love affair with guns and lethal self-defense, I have explored the history of laws that selectively shield citizens from criminal responsibility when they use force and claim self-defense. Since 2005, these “stand your ground” laws have spread to around 30 states, transforming the United States’ legal landscape.

While preexisting laws regarding justifiable use of force allowed the use of lethal force for self-defense in some circumstances, they required that people first try to retreat from a perceived threat if it was safe to do so or to seek a nonlethal solution to a hostile encounter. Stand your ground laws, meanwhile, authorize defensive violence without a duty to retreat, wherever a person may legally be. Some also expand the circumstances in which someone could use lethal force to defend property.

Although the laws appear to apply to all law-abiding citizens, research shows that they are not equitably enforced, and that they may be emboldening property owners to shoot first and question their actions later, even when there is no real threat of harm.

Certainly that seems to be the case with the shooting of Yarl. The wounding of the Black teen, who was simply trying to pick up his siblings, generated widespread outrage, especially when Kansas City Police Chief Stacey Graves suggested that investigators would consider whether the shooter – an 84-year-old white man – might have recourse to the state’s stand your ground law as a defense against prosecution.

Given that the encounter took place on the shooter’s property, there is a possibility the shooter could find legal protection in the “castle doctrine,” which allows someone to use reasonable force – without first trying to retreat – in self-defense in their home. But he would still have to show reasonable cause for firing two shots at the unarmed teen standing at his front door.

Defining ‘reasonable’ force

It seems that in the case of Yarl, state prosecutors believe that the bar of reasonable cause was not met. Andrew D. Lester, the homeowner, has since been charged with two counts: assault in the first degree and armed criminal action.

This does not preclude the defense from invoking Lester’s right to “stand his ground” and use force in self-defense, if his lawyers can show Lester truly believed Yarl posed a real threat.

Missouri’s stand your ground law, in place since 2016, removes the duty to retreat anywhere a person may legally be, even beyond one’s “castle.” But you still need to prove that force is used reasonably, that it was not carried out in aggression or anger, and that there was a genuine fear for your life.

Indeed, the resolution of cases like the Yarl shooting turn on a highly subjective reckoning of what counts as reasonable force, and on which side – prosecution or defense – bears the burden of proof.

Traditional laws on the use of force place that burden on the alleged self-defender, who must prove that their actions were reasonable. But some other states with stand your ground laws, like Florida, remove the burden of proof from the defense, placing it on the prosecution.

This means that the prosecution must prove that the alleged self-defender was truly fearful when using force. In some instances, as in the shooting of Senfield after he tried to enter a car he misidentified as his Uber, the stand your ground law becomes a shield against prosecution. No charges have been filed in that case, in large part because there were no other witnesses to contradict the shooter’s claim that he was in fear for his life when Senfield tried to enter his car.

Increase in gun homicides

Contrary to the claims of the framers and promoters of stand your ground laws, there is scant empirical evidence that the laws prevent crime. In fact, multiple studies show just the opposite.

Research on public health and crime reveals a pernicious effect of stand your ground laws on public safety, showing a correlation with increased rates of gun homicide. One study, which includes an assessment of Missouri’s law, found that the passage of stand your ground laws correlates with an 8% to 11% increase in firearm homicide rates.

An analysis of stand your ground cases in Florida, carried out by gun violence prevention group Everytown for Gun Safety, addressed the way removal of the duty to retreat encourages violent escalation; researchers suggested that over half the cases could have been resolved without loss of life.

Further, recent scholarship shows how stand your ground laws intensify existing racial injustices in the U.S. criminal legal system. A study by the think tank Urban Institute found significant discrepancies in the rate at which homicides in stand your ground cases were deemed justified, depending on the race of the shooter and the race of the deceased. White shooters were significantly more likely to to be exonerated when their victim was Black, suggesting that – particularly in states with stand your ground laws – white people may feel more legally empowered to use lethal force and avoid prosecution, as long as their victims are Black.

Encouraging armed citizenry

In the Yarl case, the possible presence of racial bias has not escaped the attention of Kansas City prosecutors. Lester’s grandson has described his grandfather as a QAnon devotee with “racist tendencies and beliefs” that likely prompted his violent reaction to Yarl’s presence on his doorstep.

Against the backdrop of historical legacies of racial bias in the U.S., stand your ground laws intensify the risks of shooting deaths in an increasingly gun-saturated public. With laws that encourage armed citizens to use force against any perceived threat – real or imagined – even the most innocent mistakes and chance encounters can turn deadly.

Caroline Light, Senior Lecturer on Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality, Harvard University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. 

Prescription drugs’ fine print is important – a toxicologist explains how to decode package inserts to take medications safely and increase their effectiveness

Package inserts contain information on the pharmacology of a drug. Kathrin Ziegler/DigitalVision via Getty Images

Brad Reisfeld, Colorado State University

Many adults take prescription drugs, and usage rates are continually increasing. With approximately 1.3 million emergency department visits in the U.S. caused by adverse drug events each year, patient education is becoming increasingly important.

All prescription drugs come with instructions on how to safely and effectively use them. Depending on the medication, there may be several types of information included: the patient package insert, medication guide and instructions for use. One or more of these documents could be folded up in the box or attached as a printed page provided by your pharmacist.

I am a scientist who studies how drugs and other chemicals affect human health. While they may look intimidating, package inserts – and particularly the prescribing information – can help patients better understand the science inside the pill bottle and blister pack, among others.

What can I learn from package inserts?

An often overlooked part of the package insert is the prescribing information. Though written primarily for health care professionals, it contains a wealth of information regarding the ways in which the medication interacts with the body.

If the prescribing information was not included with your prescription, you can often find a copy on the National Institutes of Health’s DailyMed website or other drug information websites.

As an example, let’s consider one of the most widely prescribed medications in the U.S., atorvastatin (Lipitor). Among other effects, it reduces elevated levels of cholesterol overall as well as levels of low-density lipoprotein cholesterol – LDL, or “bad” cholesterol.

Reading the insert can answer a few important questions about the drug. If you’d like to follow along, a copy of the prescription information for Lipitor can be found here.

Atorvastatin (Lipitor) is one of the most commonly prescribed drugs in the U.S. Tim Boyle/Getty Images

How does the drug work?

To answer this question, you can refer to the “Mechanism of Action” and “Pharmacodynamics” subsections of the prescription insert.

The mechanism of action and pharmacodynamics are related concepts. The mechanism of action describes the chemical and molecular interactions that cause a drug’s therapeutic or toxic effects. Pharmacodynamics refers to “what the drug does to the body,” which includes the mechanism of action as well as how other factors like drug concentration influences its effects.

Often the mechanism of action of a drug is related to how it interacts with cell receptors and enzymes involved in mediating specific signals and biochemical reactions in the body.

In the case of Lipitor, the prescribing information tells us three important things about how the drug works. First, the liver is the primary site that produces cholesterol in the body and the area the drug is meant to target. Second, the drug works by inhibiting an enzyme involved in cholesterol production called HMG-CoA reductase. And third, the drug increases the number of LDL cholesterol receptors on cell surfaces, ultimately increasing the catabolism, or metabolic breakdown, of LDL cholesterol.

Where does the drug go in my body?

Before we answer this question, let’s start with some background information in the “Pharmacokinetics” subsection.

Pharmacokinetics can be thought of as “what the body does to the drug.” It focuses on four major processes the body undergoes in response to the chemical: absorption, or how the drug gets into the body; distribution, or how the drug is dispersed throughout the body; metabolism, or how the drug is converted into other chemical forms; and excretion, or how the drug is eliminated from the body.

The pharmacokinetics of a drug are determined by factors related to the chemical itself and the person taking the medication. For instance, disease state, age, sex and genetic makeup can all cause the same medication to work differently in different people.

Understanding what factors influence how a drug works in the body can aid in safer administration. andreswd/E+ via Getty Images

Now, let’s look at the “Distribution” subsection.

For Lipitor, the prescription insert does not specifically say where the drug goes in the body, but it does note that the volume of distribution is 381 liters. The volume of distribution is the ratio of the amount of the drug in the body overall to its concentration in the blood. A value greater than about 30 liters suggests that the drug has entered body tissues and is not confined to the bloodstream. For reference, the drug warfarin, which prevents blood clots, is tightly bound to proteins in the blood and has a volume of distribution of only 8 liters. On the other hand, chloroquine, an antimalarial drug that enters body fat, has a value of 15,000 liters.

Does the drug cause the effects or its byproducts?

Though the therapeutic effects of most drugs come from the chemical compound it’s made of, many break down into active metabolites in the body that also have some relevant biological effects.

Some medications are administered in an inactive form called a prodrug that the body converts into metabolites with the desired therapeutic effects. Drugmakers generally use prodrugs because they have better pharmacokinetics – such as improved absorption and distribution in the body – than the active form of the drug.

In the case of Lipitor, the “Metabolism” subsection under “Pharmacokinetics” tells us that the drug is broken down into several products and that these metabolites contribute significantly to its therapeutic effect.

How long will the drug be in my system?

A key drug property to consider in this case is its half-life, which is the length of time required for the concentration of the drug to decrease to half of its initial amount in the body. Information about a drug’s half-life is found in the “Excretion” subsection under “Pharmacokinetics.”

The half-life for Lipitor is approximately 14 hours. If you were to stop taking the medication, 97% of the drug would be gone from your blood after about three days, or five half-lives.

The prescription insert provides another interesting piece of information: because Lipitor’s active metabolites have a longer half-life than the drug itself, the half-life for its cholesterol enzyme inhibiting effects is 20 to 30 hours. This means that the drug’s effects may last even after the drug itself is out of your system.

Drugs can interact with one another and certain foods in harmful ways.

Why do I need to take medications with food or at certain times?

Eating food can change the amount and rate at which a drug is absorbed into the body in several ways, including changing the acidity of the digestive system, altering the release of bile and increasing blood flow to the gut.

For Lipitor specifically, the answer to this question can be found in the “Absorption” subsection under “Pharmacokinetics.” Food decreases the rate and extent of Lipitor’s absorption but doesn’t significantly affect LDL cholesterol reduction.

Interestingly, the insert also states that the blood concentration of the drug is significantly lower when taken in the evening than in the morning, but reduction in LDL cholesterol levels is the same regardless of when the drug is taken.

The upshot of all of this is written on the drug label on the outside of the package: Lipitor can be taken with or without food. Morning or evening is not specified, but the recommendation is to take it at the same time every day.

Why does my doctor ask about other drugs I’m taking?

Drugs can interact with one another in ways that affect their safety and efficacy. For instance, two drugs may rely on the same enzyme system in the body to break them down. Taking them at the same time can ultimately lead to higher-than-anticipated levels of either or both drugs in the body.

Information to answer this question can be found in the “Drug Interactions” section.

One of the drug categories of concern for Lipitor are “strong inhibitors of CYP 3A4,” an enzyme that plays a key role in metabolizing many drugs. Because Lipitor itself is broken down by this enzyme, taking it alongside drugs that inhibit CYP 3A4, such as the antibiotic clarithromycin or the fungal infection drug itraconazole, can lead to its increased concentration in the blood and potentially result in adverse effects.

Brad Reisfeld, Professor of Chemical and Biological Engineering, Biomedical Engineering and Public Health, Colorado State University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. 

Brighten Your Brunch Spread

(Family Features) A staple of warm weekend days, brunch combines the best flavors of the first two meals of the day. Every great brunch spread complements its savory items with something sweet, something refreshing and a signature beverage, and there’s one ingredient that can help cover all of those bases – 100% orange juice.

An option like Florida Orange Juice is not only delicious but delivers a powerful combination of vitamins, minerals and phytonutrients that have associated health benefits. One of nature’s nutrient dense foods, one 8-ounce glass of orange juice provides 100% of the recommended daily value of vitamin C and is also a good source of potassium, folate and thiamin, making it a great substitute for sugar-sweetened beverages and simple addition to brunch staples like this Orange Oatmeal.

When combined with a healthy lifestyle, 100% orange juice may also help support a healthy immune system. Orange juice contains beneficial plant compounds, flavonoids and colorful carotenoids to aid in fighting inflammation and cell communication. It is also rich in vitamin C, which helps strengthen immune systems by protecting cells and promoting the production and function of immune cells. Vitamin D, which can be found in fortified juices, also plays an important role in regulating immune response and helps immune cells fight off bacteria and viruses that get into the body.

Since 100% orange juice is naturally almost 90% water, it can help support hydration as it includes several electrolytes like potassium, magnesium and, in fortified juices, calcium, to aid in fluid balance. Combining Florida Orange Juice, watermelon juice and grapefruit juice, this Citrus Watermelonade is a bright, seasonal thirst quencher that is the perfect addition to your drink selection at brunch.

“Maintaining overall wellness and hydration is important as we ease into the warmer months of the year and more time is spent outdoors,” said Dr. Rosa Walsh, director of scientific research at the Florida Department of Citrus. “Florida Orange Juice includes many essential vitamins and minerals that aid in hydration, and it is a great complement to water in helping to provide nourishment before, during or after any activity.”

For more information and sweet, nutritious brunch recipes, visit FloridaJuice.com.

Citrus Watermelonade

• 1 cup hot water
• 2 cups sugar
• 6 cups watermelon, seeded, rind removed and cut into 1-inch pieces, divided
• 2 cups Florida Orange Juice
• 1 cup Florida Grapefruit Juice
• 3/4 cup lemon juice
• 3/4 cup lime juice
• 2 cups Florida Oranges, cut into 1-inch pieces, peeled
• 1/2 cup mint leaves
• ice, for serving
• Florida Orange Slices, for garnish (optional)
• watermelon chunks, for garnish (optional)

1. In small saucepan over low heat, combine hot water and sugar; heat until sugar is dissolved. Refrigerate until chilled.
2. In blender, puree 4 cups watermelon until smooth.
3. In large pitcher, stir watermelon juice, chilled sugar syrup, orange juice, grapefruit juice, lemon juice and lime juice until combined.
4. Add remaining watermelon pieces, orange pieces and mint leaves; refrigerate 2-3 hours until well chilled.
5. Serve over ice in glasses. Garnish with orange slices and watermelon chunks, if desired.

Orange Oatmeal

• 1 cup Florida Orange Juice
• 1 1/2 cups water
• 1 cup quick-cooking steel-cut oats
• 1 Florida Orange, peeled and diced
• 1 tablespoon agave nectar or honey
• 1/4 teaspoon cinnamon
• 1/4 teaspoon salt

1. In medium saucepan over high heat, bring orange juice and water to boil.
2. Add oats to boiling liquids.
3. Return to boil then reduce to medium heat and cook, uncovered, 5 minutes, stirring frequently.
4. Mix in diced orange, agave nectar, cinnamon and salt. Remove pan from heat; let stand 1 minute before serving.

SOURCE:
Florida Department of Citrus

Eyes on the deep

Decades of exploring the seafloor have helped oceanographer Samantha Joye tackle marine issues — from the underwater movement of oil from Deepwater Horizon to the biology of remote microbial communities

By Laura Poppick

In the early morning of April 21, 2010, oceanographer Samantha Joye received a troubling email from a research partner out at sea in the Gulf of Mexico. What should have been a routine trip to collect water and sediment samples from the seafloor had, instead, turned into a disaster scene: Plumes of smoke billowed in the distance, her colleague wrote, and Coast Guard boats were hightailing it past their research vessel. They returned to port, and a knot formed in Joye’s gut that would persist for months to come.

The team soon learned that a BP oil rig called Deepwater Horizon had just exploded, resulting in the deaths of 11 oil workers and precipitating the largest-ever accidental marine oil spill as more than 200 million gallons of toxic petroleum were left to swirl through the gulf.

It was also the deepest-ever oil spill, much of it emanating from a wellhead located nearly a mile down, on the seafloor. In the days after the explosion, Joye worried that large volumes of oil and gas remained trapped at depth, surging within deep-sea currents. And she knew that finding this plume would be critical to its eventual cleanup. So she urged her team to repurpose upcoming ship time, meant for more routine sample collection in the gulf, to track down that plume — not an easy pivot for oceanographers used to planning research cruises years in advance. “Fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants ocean science is just not something that is done,” Joye says.

Her team was right to change tack. In the following weeks, they became the first to locate a massive river of pollutants as it wound between deep-sea knolls and blanketed currents with benzene, toluene and other known carcinogens and neurotoxins found in crude oil and gas. That meandering underwater plume contained more than half of all the material released during the 87-day blowout, invisible to the satellite imaging that surveyed the spill from above. If it had only been assessed with surface slicks, “half of the oil and all of the gas would have been unaccounted for,” Joye says.

That brew of toxins would go on to harm or kill hundreds of thousands of animals in the years to come, mutilating the livers of seabirds, the lungs of dolphins and, it’s thought, the skin of fish. Now, more than a decade later, much of the material has broken down, but some persists within ocean sediments. Joye leads a consortium of researchers that has continued to monitor these environmental impacts, one of several projects she pursues out of her lab at the University of Georgia.

More broadly, Joye specializes in the unique metabolisms of marine bacteria that feed on oil and gas — an area of study that has helped to shape debates about how best to leverage these bacteria to clean up spills. She’s drawn to these microbes, she says, not just for their capacity to remedy disasters but also for their role in stabilizing the planet’s climate by consuming greenhouse gases. She’s now looking at how these microbial communities and their numerous environmental services may shift or suffer in a warming world.

Joye approaches her work with a rigor and charisma that has often landed her in the public sphere, including participation in the BBC documentary Blue Planet II, consulting work on an educational video game, and collaboration on a kids’ cartoon. She carves out more time than is typical for such education and outreach because, she says, she views reaching young people and helping to inspire the next generation of marine scientists as a sort of insurance policy for the future of the ocean.

Her microbial expertise and explorations reach beyond the marine realm, into lakes, mangroves and estuaries — lending her a scope of knowledge that attracts colleagues to work with her, and has earned her a roster of nods and awards in her 30-plus-year career. “She’s made really exceptional contributions,” says Beth Orcutt, a geomicrobiologist who studied with Joye as a graduate student more than a decade ago and now researches marine microbes at the Bigelow Laboratory for Ocean Sciences in East Boothbay, Maine. While many microbiologists orchestrate their careers around a single organism or system, Joye’s broader focus allows her to take a more well-rounded approach and more easily figure out potential problems or biases in her findings, Orcutt says. “This is why I think she’s so respected in the field.”

Roots of an ocean explorer

Though she’s loved the ocean since childhood, Joye didn’t grow up wanting to be an oceanographer. Her family grew soybeans, cotton, tobacco and other crops on a farm in South Carolina, and she went to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1983 with plans to become a doctor. But she took a marine science course on a whim during her junior year and found herself hooked and excelling. The professor of that course wrote her a letter urging her to consider graduate school, and she took that suggestion to heart. “He lit a fire in my imagination, and I was able to focus all my intellectual energy and curiosity on asking questions about the oceans,” she says.

She went on to earn a master’s and a PhD in marine sciences from North Carolina and then landed a postdoctoral position at San Francisco State University in 1993, studying communities of marine microbes called methanotrophs — “methane eaters” that help to stabilize Earth’s climate by consuming that potent greenhouse gas. That year, she attended a session at a conference about similar microbes that inhabit the deep sea; when she approached one of the speakers with questions, the result — to Joye’s surprise — was an invitation to join an upcoming research cruise to the Gulf of Mexico. The 1994 trip brought her down to the seafloor for the first time and became the catalyst for much of her work thereafter.

Since then, Joye has led or participated in well over 100 trips to the bottom of the ocean, many in the Gulf of Mexico; she attributes her needle-in-a-haystack luck of finding the submerged oil and gas from the Deepwater spill to the many hours she spent cruising there. As she navigates the underwater canyons and volcanoes of that terrain, she takes troves of photographs and video footage, and uses robotic arms and baskets to collect samples of water, rock and microbial mats that she brings back to the lab for analysis.

She fills notebooks with thoughts as she descends, often formulating new research questions in the moment. “There’s this burst of creativity and awareness that I have never gotten any other way that I get when I’m in a submarine,” she says. If it weren’t for her three adolescent children, she adds, she’d want to sink to the bottom of the ocean every day.

When down there, she often navigates to structures called hydrocarbon seeps, where oil and gas naturally spew out of fissures in the seafloor and support an unexpectedly lush oasis of mussel beds, giant six-foot-long tube worms and unique communities of bacteria with a strong appetite for oil and gas. Over the years, she has explored how these microbial communities share and compete for resources and has been surprised to find just how often the waste of one organism serves as a food source for another, so that different species coexist cooperatively in their remote deep-sea environments.

Her intimate knowledge of these microbes and environments, which she details in an article in the Annual Review of Earth and Planetary Sciences, helped her to critically assess the controversial use of chemical dispersants to clean up the Deepwater Horizon spill in the years following the disaster. She wondered whether the application of these detergent-like chemicals — which break oil into tiny droplets that are easier for microbes to consume — might attract bacteria more inclined to feast on the dispersant itself than the oil, and potentially even push away the oil-centric microbes. If this were the case, more oil would remain in the ocean than if no dispersant were applied at all.

For the Deepwater Horizon disaster , this consideration wasn’t trivial: An unprecedented 7 million liters of dispersant ended up in the Gulf of Mexico following the spill, initially in an inefficient firehose-type application, Joye says. She and colleagues have since conducted laboratory studies that have shown that the dispersant can, indeed, slow oil degradation by promoting the growth of dispersant-eating microbes and suppressing the oil-eating ones. She says it’s still unclear whether, when and how best to use dispersant, but she urges the marine science community to consider these nuances in future spill assessments.

“Her work on that has been state of the art,” says Claire Paris-Limouzy, an oceanographer at the University of Miami who has worked with Joye to assess the persistence of oil — dissolved and difficult to track — in the gulf to this day. As deep-sea oil exploration continues to expand around the world and perpetuate the risk of more deepwater spills, Paris-Limouzy says, it’s crucial to understand how these spills emanate underwater and how best to clean them up.

Such work doesn’t come without its challenges. Collecting samples amid the oil slick in the weeks after Deepwater Horizon required donning full-body hazmat suits in 105°F weather and inhaling benzene and other noxious fumes on a ship whose air filtration regularly malfunctioned due to oil clogging the water intakes. “It was pretty terrible conditions to work in,” Joye says.

But now, a decade later, those efforts have laid important groundwork for understanding how marine microbial communities help to keep the ocean healthy. Joye is currently exploring whether stressors such as the increased water temperature and acidity associated with climate change shift the collaborative nature of these ecosystems and make them more competitive, favoring one organism over another — and how imbalances she finds may, in turn, influence other ocean systems.

And she continues to intensify her outreach with youth, recently establishing an ocean discovery camp for middle-school students in Georgia. She plans to follow her campers in the years to come, in hopes of supporting some to pursue lifelong careers in ocean science.

“Getting these kids engaged and firing up their passions now is something that I think is just critically important,” she says. “It’s important for the future of everybody.”

Check out Reset — An ongoing series exploring how the world is navigating the coronavirus pandemic, its consequences and the way forward.

Laura Poppick is a Maine-based freelance science journalist with a background in earth science. Her favorite deep-sea creature is the giant tube worm. Twitter: @laurapoppick

This article originally appeared in Knowable Magazine, an independent journalistic endeavor from Annual Reviews.

Sizzling science: How to grill a flavorful steak

Want to learn how cooking transforms beef’s flavor? Meat scientists have the answers.

By Bob Holmes

Summer has arrived, and it’s time to fire up the backyard grill. Though many of us are trying to eat less beef for environmental reasons, it’s hard to resist indulging in an occasional steak — and you’ll want to make the most of the experience.

So, what’s the best way to grill that steak? Science has some answers.

Meat scientists (many of them, unsurprisingly, in Texas) have spent whole careers studying how to produce the tenderest, most flavorful beef possible. Much of what they’ve learned holds lessons only for cattle producers and processors, but a few of their findings can guide backyard grillmasters in their choice of meat and details of the grilling process.

Let’s start with the choice of meat. Every experienced cook knows that the lightly used muscles of the loin, along the backbone, have less connective tissue and thus give tenderer results than the hard-working muscles of the leg. And they know to look for steaks with lots of marbling, the fat deposits between muscle fibers that are a sign of high-quality meat. “If you have more marbling, the meat will be tenderer, juicier, and it will have richer flavor,” says Sulaiman Matarneh, a meat scientist at Utah State University who wrote about muscle biology and meat quality in the 2021  Annual Review of Animal Biosciences.

From a flavor perspective, in fact, the differences between one steak and the next are mostly a matter of fat content: the amount of marbling and the composition of the fatty acid subunits of the fat molecules. Premium cuts like ribeye have more marbling and are also richer in oleic acid, an especially tasty fatty acid — “the one fatty acid that frequently correlates with positive eating experience,” says Jerrad Legako, a meat scientist at Texas Tech University in Lubbock. Sirloin, in contrast, has less oleic acid and more fatty acid types that can yield less appealing, fishy flavor hints during cooking.

That fatty acid difference also plays out in a big decision that consumers make when they buy a steak: grain-fed or grass-fed beef? Grain-fed cattle — animals that live their final months in a feedlot eating a diet rich in corn and soybeans — have meat that’s higher in oleic acid. Animals that spend their whole life grazing on pasture have a higher proportion of omega-3 fatty acids, polyunsaturated fatty acids that break down into smaller molecules with fishy and gamy flavors. Many consumers prefer to buy grass-fed beef anyway, either to avoid the ethical issues of feedlots or because they like that gamy flavor and leaner meat.

The biggest influence on the final flavor of that steak, though, is how you cook it. Flavorwise, cooking meat accomplishes two things. First, the heat of the grill breaks the meat’s fatty acids into smaller molecules that are more volatile — that is, more likely to become airborne. These volatiles are responsible for the steak’s aroma, which accounts for the majority of its flavor. Molecules called aldehydes, ketones and alcohols among that breakdown mix are what we perceive as distinctively beefy.

The second way that cooking builds flavor is through browning, a process that chemists call the Maillard reaction. This is a fantastically complex process in which amino acids and traces of sugars in the meat react at high temperatures to kick off a cascade of chemical changes that result in many different volatile end products. Most important of these are molecules called pyrazines and furans, which contribute the roasty, nutty flavors that steak aficionados crave. The longer and hotter the cooking, the deeper into the Maillard reaction you go and the more of these desirable end products you get — until eventually, the meat starts to char, producing undesirable bitter, burnt flavors.

The challenge for the grillmaster is to achieve the ideal level of Maillard products at the moment the meat reaches the desired degree of doneness. Here, there are three variables to play with: temperature, time and the thickness of the steak.

Thin steaks cook through more quickly, so they need a hot grill to generate enough browning in the short time available, says Chris Kerth, a meat scientist at Texas A&M University. Kerth and his colleagues have studied this process in the lab, searing steaks to precise specifications and feeding the results into a gas chromatograph, which measures the amount of each volatile chemical produced.

Kerth found, as expected, that thin, half-inch steaks cooked at relatively low temperatures have mostly the beefy flavors characteristic of fatty acid breakdown, while higher temperatures also produce a lot of the roasty pyrazines that result from the Maillard reaction. So if your steak is thin, crank up that grill — and leave the lid open so that the meat cooks through a little more slowly. That will give you time to build a complex, beefy-roasty flavor.

And to get the best sear on both sides, flip the meat about a third of the way through the expected cook time, not halfway — that’s because as the first side cooks, the contracting muscle fibers drive water to the uncooked side. After you flip, this water cools the second side so it takes longer to brown, Kerth’s team found.

When the scientists tested thicker, 1.5-inch steaks, the opposite problem happened: The exterior would burn unpleasantly before the middle finished cooking. For these steaks, a moderate grill temperature gave the best mix of volatiles. And sure enough, when Kerth’s team tested their steaks on actual people, they found that diners gave lower ratings to thick steaks grilled hot and fast. Diners rated the other temperatures and cooking times as all similar to each other, but thick steaks cooked at moderate temperatures won out by a nose. 

That might seem odd, given that steakhouses often boast of their thick slabs of prime beef and the intense heat of their grills — exactly the combination Kerth’s study found least desirable. It works because the steakhouses use a two-step cooking process: First, they sear the meat on the hot grill, and then they finish cooking in a moderate oven. “That way, they get the degree of doneness to match the sear that they want,” says Kerth. Home cooks can do the same by popping their seared meat into a 350°F oven until it reaches their desired doneness.

The best degree of doneness, of course, is largely a matter of personal preference — but science has something to say here, too. Meat left rare, says Kerth, doesn’t receive enough heat to break down its fatty acids to generate beefy flavors. And once you go past medium, you lose some of the “bloody” flavors that come with lightly cooked meat. “A lot of people, myself included, like a little bit of bloody note with the brown pyrazines and Maillard compounds,” says Kerth. “It has a bigger flavor.” For those reasons, he advises, “I wouldn’t go any lower than medium rare or certainly any higher than medium. Then you just start losing a lot of the flavor.”

Kerth has one more piece of advice for home cooks: Watch the meat closely when it’s on the grill! “When you’re at those temperatures, a lot happens in a short period of time,” he says. “You start getting a lot of chemical reactions happening very, very quickly.” That’s the scientific basis for what every experienced griller has learned from (literally) bitter experience: It’s easy to burn the meat if you’re not paying attention.

Happy scientifically informed grilling!

Bob Holmes is a science writer based in Edmonton, Canada, and author of Flavor: The Science of Our Most Neglected Sense. He grills his steaks differently after reporting this story.

This article originally appeared in Knowable Magazine, an independent journalistic endeavor from Annual Reviews.

The science of placebos is fueling quackery

OPINION: The placebo effect is real. So are the ethical conundrums posed by those who would exploit the latest research advances for profit.

By Fabrizio Benedetti

For several decades now, many scientists, including me, have been working hard to reveal the full power and scope of the placebo effect — the amazing ability of a simple sugar pill or other non-pharmaceutical “fake intervention” to improve someone’s quality of life. This research has been crucial to giving scientific credibility to a powerful psychological effect. But the advances of science have also backfired, spawning an alternative industry that preys on the vulnerable.

The placebo effect describes how the mere belief and expectation of receiving a drug may produce a benefit, such as a reduction in  pain. Albeit strange at first sight, the placebo effect is based on profound and fascinating mechanisms in the human brain, and highlights the power of attention given to a patient by a caregiver. As a neuroscientist, I have been working on understanding these mechanisms for 30 years, alongside other researchers around the world who specialize in everything from biochemistry to physiology, genetics to brain imaging. What has  emerged is an understanding of how the mere expectation of a therapeutic benefit can activate a variety of chemicals in the human brain, such as pain-relieving opioids and cannabinoids, as well as pleasure-enhancing dopamine. Placebos, a doctor’s words and drugs can all share some common mechanisms of action.

All this means that some alternative medicines can indeed have positive outcomes for patients, though not necessarily through the mechanisms that the therapy’s inventors supposed, but rather through a placebo effect. This holds true for treatments ranging from strange talismans to acupuncture — studies have shown that pain relief is about the same for patients receiving true acupuncture with needles, for example, as for those receiving sham acupuncture with trick needles.

The scientific advances in understanding placebo are fascinating. But one  unfortunate outcome of all this work is that profit-seeking companies and individuals now have a new weapon: It is no longer necessary to demonstrate the effectiveness of their proposed therapies; it is enough to assert that these work because of the placebo effect. I receive myriad eccentric proposals for new therapies, ranging from talismans and concoctions to mascots and weird rituals. Their inventors claim that these are capable of inducing substantial health benefits and often seek my endorsement. These proposals have  stepped up sharply in recent years. Sadly, the science of the placebo effect is fueling this new breed of pseudoscience.

Placebos do not cure

As far as we know, placebos do not cure, but can sometimes improve quality of life. Research tells us that placebos can reduce symptoms like pain and muscle rigidity for sufferers of Parkinson’s disease, for example, but they don’t affect the progression of the disease — the degeneration of brain cells keeps advancing. There is plenty of confusion on this point and unfortunately many claim that they can cure virtually all illnesses with placebos.

Here are some things we do know. Placebos and opioids have been shown to influence the same pain-inhibiting systems in the brain, with powerful results. In sufferers of Parkinson’s disease, placebos have been found to be as effective as amphetamine in doubling dopamine concentrations. For those with anxiety and depression, placebos have been found to act on the same brain regions as selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor drugs (SSRIs).

People can also be trained to have a response to a placebo by pairing it, for a while, with a pharmaceutical intervention, and then leaving only the placebo to do the job. Patients have been trained, for example, to respond to a specific taste in the same way they do to a drug that controls interleukin-2, a protein that regulates white blood cells in the immune system. Others have been trained so that the delivery of sham oxygen can relieve high-altitude headaches.

Even “honest placebos,” where patients know they are receiving a fake treatment, can work — just in the same way that we can experience real fear and physiological reactions like goose bumps from a horror movie, despite knowing that the bloodcurdling scenes are fake.

So, if a salesperson says: “This concoction (or ritual or talisman) will reduce your pain,” it is not necessarily a lie, as the placebo effect may indeed stimulate pain-relieving circuits in the brain. But anyone could truthfully use these words, within limits.

These marketers often overstate the size of the possible response, claim to provide a “cure” rather than pain relief or incorrectly suggest that only their own expensive products will have this effect. Even worse, they may present the products as an alternative to more effective traditional medications for serious conditions such as cancer. In other words, they prey on the vulnerable by making undeliverable promises, purportedly backed by the science of placebo.

Even if taking a placebo can reduce symptoms such as pain, this isn’t always the best course of action. An apparently trivial pain may, for example, be the first sign of something far more serious. Treating the pain alone may prevent diagnosis by a physician or delay important medical treatments.

An ethical crossroads in placebo research

The exploitation of any new scientific discovery often poses ethical concerns. In physics, nuclear energy can be used to provide energy or to blow up cities. In biomedicine, genomic studies can be used to improve medicine or to reinforce harmful stereotypes. It is not always easy to decide what to do, such as applying ethical constraints to scientific investigation, or restricting certain applications.

This is the ethical crossroads we are now at with the placebo effect.

How can we stop society from taking the dangerous path? Education, communication and honesty are the best friends of medical practice. Patients and health care professionals deserve to know what placebos can and cannot do.

The research and medical communities must be more transparent about the efficacy of many conventional pharmacological and nonpharmacological treatments, by acknowledging that some of them are useful whereas some others are not. Many over-the-counter products have doubtful efficacy, for example. Honesty will boost patients’ trust and confidence in medicine, which are the best antidotes to quackery.

Fabrizio Benedetti is a neuroscientist at the University of Turin Medical School, in Turin, Italy, and director of medicine and the physiology of hypoxia at Plateau Rosa Laboratories in Switzerland.

This article originally appeared in Knowable Magazine, an independent journalistic endeavor from Annual Reviews.

What are stock buybacks, which critics are blaming for hastening Bed Bath & Beyond’s bankruptcy? A finance professor explains

Bed Bath & Beyond has spent billions in recent years on share buybacks. AP Photo/Ted Shaffrey

D. Brian Blank, Mississippi State University

Bed Bath & Beyond filed for bankruptcy on April 23, 2023, and some analysts are blaming the billions of dollars the retailer spent on share buybacks as one of the reasons for its downfall. In total, the company has spent nearly US$12 billion buying back its own stock since 2005, including $1 billion in 2021 alone – cash that could have potentially helped stave off bankruptcy.

Bed Bath & Beyond is hardly alone in snapping up its own stock. Companies have been buying back record amounts of their own shares in recent years, which prompted President Joe Biden to propose quadrupling the tax on buybacks to 4%.

But what are stock buybacks, and why do some people consider them to be a bad thing? The Conversation tapped D. Brian Blank, who studies company financial decision-making at Mississippi State University, to fill us in.

1. What are stock buybacks?

Before we can answer that question, first we need to understand the basics of how stock works.

Stock represents an ownership interest in a company, such that stockholders have a stake in the business. Companies use stock as one way to raise capital by selling their shares to investors, usually in an initial public offering.

Most stockholders, however, obtain stock by buying it on a secondary market, like the New York Stock Exchange. In this case, one person chooses to sell their ownership in the company, while another person buys it.

As partial owners, shareholders see the value of their stock rise when the company does well.

One way investors can benefit from holding the stock is that some corporations pay dividends, which are payments made directly to shareholders. Another way that stockholders can benefit is by selling the stock for more than they paid for it. Together, this creates a return on investment.

And this brings us to share buybacks – and why investors like them.

2. Why do companies buy back their own stock?

When companies have extra capital, they might go into the secondary market and buy back stock from investors. This is often referred to as a stock repurchase or buyback program. Companies that are older and less focused on rapid growth tend to do them more often.

Companies do this for a variety of reasons, such as because they think their shares are undervalued and want to signal optimism to Wall Street, or because they simply want another way to distribute profits to shareholders – a key goal of any company – other than through dividends.

Shareholders like buybacks because companies often pay a premium over market price. And when companies buy their own stock, this removes those shares from the market, which has the effect of lifting share prices as supply goes down, benefiting existing stockholders.

It’s estimated that American companies bought back a record $1 trillion of their own stock in 2022. And Apple is the biggest user of buybacks, having spent $557 billion over the past decade repurchasing its own shares.

President Joe Biden said companies should ‘do the right thing’ and stop buying back their own shares. AP Photo/Patrick Semansky

3. Why do Biden and others dislike buybacks?

Critics like Biden contend that share buybacks represent short-term thinking that doesn’t actually create any real value. They argue instead that companies should use more of their profits to invest in more productive activities like business operations, innovation or employees.

Returning money that a company makes to stockholders does mean less capital is available for other investments. In his speech, Biden specifically called out “Big Oil” companies for using the record profits they’ve earned from high energy prices to buy back their stock rather than investing in new wells to increase supply – and help reduce gas prices.

But the decision whether to invest to increase domestic production is a complicated one. For example, the reason companies aren’t investing in new wells right now is not simply because they are buying back stock. The reason has more to do with how oil companies, and their shareholders, don’t think it is profitable to invest in more supply for a whole host of reasons, including the global push for greener energy by both policymakers and consumers, which is bound to reduce demand for fossil fuels in the future.

It’s also worth noting that while share repurchases are becoming increasingly common and controversial, they remain very similar to dividends, which don’t prompt the same concerns among politicians.

4. Would increasing the tax result in fewer buybacks?

The 1% tax on buybacks is actually brand new.

Congress passed the tax in 2022 as part of the Inflation Reduction Act. It took effect at the beginning of 2023 and only affects buyback programs of $1 million or more.

Usually when an activity is taxed, it happens less frequently. So, I expect the tax to nudge companies to spend less on buybacks and more elsewhere. While politicians intend more of the money to be used to invest in their productive capacity, companies may simply spend more on paying shareholders dividends.

Since the tax is new, it’s hard to evaluate its actual impact. Companies reportedly accelerated their repurchase programs in 2022 to avoid paying the tax.

But early data from 2023 suggests the 1% tax isn’t significantly deterring buybacks. Companies announced $132 billion in buybacks in January, three times as much as a year earlier and the most for the month on record.

Biden’s proposal to boost the tax to 4% may alter corporate behavior more. But again, it may just lead to greater dividend payments, not the other types of investments he and others hope for.

In addition, given that Republicans control the House, and Democrats have only a narrow majority in the Senate, this proposal has little chance of becoming law anytime soon.

The reasons why large corporations make the decisions they do about where to allocate capital – whether to build a factory, hire more workers or buy back stock – are complicated and, in my view, never taken lightly. These decisions have many facets and implications, and are not necessarily bad. I believe this is something worth remembering the next time you hear politicians saying “corporations should do the right thing.”

This is an updated version of an article originally published on Feb. 10, 2023.

D. Brian Blank, Assistant Professor of Finance, Mississippi State University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. 

Willie Nelson at 90: Country music’s elder statesman still on the road again

Willie Nelson’s face is as iconic as his voice, his songs and his beat-up old guitar. Gary Miller/Getty Images

Jason Mellard, Texas State University

Willie Nelson’s unofficial theme song, “On the Road Again,” remains accurate as he turns 90 on April 29, 2023. The country music legend is on tour, with dates scheduled into October 2023.

Assessing Nelson’s legacy is challenging because there are so many Willies to assess. There is historical Willie Nelson, child of the Depression. There is iconic Willie Nelson, near embodiment of Texas myth. There is outlaw Willie Nelson, revolutionizing the country music industry. There is activist Willie Nelson, Farm Aid’s co-founder and biofuel pioneer. There is Willie Nelson the songwriter of rare and poignant gifts, and more Willie Nelsons yet to be named.

As a Texas music historian, I find that Nelson’s legacy also challenges appraisal because the concept assumes closure, a pastness, while the man at 90 still seems to be active everywhere. The LBJ School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas recently announced the Willie Nelson Endowment Uplifting Rural Communities. Nelson is headlining a star-studded tribute concert weekend in honor of his 90th birthday at the Hollywood Bowl on April 29 and 30, 2023. And the country outlaw is a current nominee for the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame.

While Nelson’s story is vast, it can be distilled down to this: He sprang from the Texas cotton fields and earned his spurs in the state’s dance halls before becoming one of Nashville’s signature songwriters in the 1960s. He then returned to Texas a prodigal son, fostering Austin’s musical ascent and, as the story goes, brokering a peace between the warring rednecks and hippies. He redefined country music’s image and industry through the outlaw revolt of the 1970s. He catapulted to pop stardom in the 1980s but always went out on the road making music with his friends, night after night.

From Texas to Nashville and back

The cover of the songbook Willie Nelson wrote at age 12. Courtesy of The Wittliff Collections., CC BY-NC-ND

Born on April 29, 1933, in a small town between Waco and Dallas, Nelson and his sister Bobbie took to music at a young age. Nelson joined his first band at 10 and was a songwriter by 12. We know this in part from a curious artifact in the Wittliff Collections at Texas State University. Nelson’s first songbook has all the doodles of a child’s arts and crafts project. The songs inside, though – “Hangover Blues,” “Faded Love and Wasted Dream,” “I Guess I Was Born to Be Blue” – speak to honky-tonk themes far beyond Nelson’s years.

He spent the next years chasing the life in those songs, hitting the road as an itinerant performer. Like most aspiring country artists, Nelson ended up in Nashville. In 1961, he joined Ray Price’s band, the Cherokee Cowboys. Price had been a roommate of Hank Williams Sr.‘s, and the Cherokee Cowboys built on Williams’ legacy, at various times including not just Nelson but also his pals Johnny Bush, Johnny Paycheck and Roger Miller.

Nelson moved from success to success as a songwriter, with Ray Price singing “Night Life,” Faron Young singing “Hello Walls” and Patsy Cline singing “Crazy.” He likely would have made it to the Country Music Hall of Fame with this early songwriting alone. He did record, but Nelson’s flamenco guitar, jazzy phrasing and eccentric lyricism did not fit the mold of 1960s Nashville. Facing personal and professional challenges that culminated in his house’s burning down, Nelson left Tennessee for Texas by decade’s end.

There had already been inklings of the countercultural turn that came next. Willie had a soulful cover of the Beatles’ “Yesterday” on a 1966 live album. In 1971, his resonant voice opened “Yesterday’s Wine,” before any music began, with a New Age declaration:

“There is great confusion on Earth,” Nelson mused, “and the power that is has concluded the following: Perfect man has visited Earth already, and his voice was heard; the voice of imperfect man must now be made manifest. And I have been selected as the most likely candidate.”

This was not Chet Atkins’ country music. The qualities that made this imperfect man a Nashville outsider transformed him into the most prominent symbol for a new cosmic cowboy style that was coming together in Austin venues like the Armadillo World Headquarters and events like Nelson’s own annual Fourth of July Picnic, which is scheduled for its 50th anniversary on July 4, 2023.

Willie Nelson’s classic band came into shape while gigging in Texas with sister Bobbie on piano, Mickey Raphael on harmonica, Bee Spears on bass, Jody Payne on guitar and Paul English on drums. They were a family band – in the country sense like the Carter Family – but also in the hippie sense, a roving carnival akin to Ken Kesey’s Merry Pranksters. The group’s sound mixed traditional country with the improvisations of psychedelia and jazz. You can hear the crackling combination in live performances from the period, including the pilot episode of the long-running PBS television program “Austin City Limits.”

Rise of the outlaws

Nelson’s albums from the 1970s blazed new paths for country music. Nelson secured complete creative control for his album “Red-Headed Stranger,” released in 1975, and its success struck a blow in support of artists’ independence from the constraints of the country music industry in Nashville, a rebellion that took further root with “Wanted! The Outlaws” the following year. That album – a collaboration with Tompall Glaser, Jessie Colter and frequent partner Waylon Jennings – named a movement.

Willie Nelson’s band performed on the pilot episode of ‘Austin City Limits’ on Oct. 17, 1974.

Outlaw country was in part a marketing move for country artists who wore their hair long, leaned into rock’s grit or wore biker leather. On another level, though, Nelson and Jennings lodged a successful critique of industry practices for country artists who wanted to use their own bands in the studio, have a greater say in the material they recorded, and be regarded as serious artists rather than simply the label’s hired help.

The outlaw years took Willie to a new class of stardom. He made films with Robert Redford and duetted with Julio Iglesias.

There were twists in the path, though. In 1990, the outlaw image turned literal in a high-profile dustup with the IRS. The loss of his son Billy the next year was a much more harrowing setback. Through it all, he kept on the road, kept recording and stuck with family, community and song.

Advocate and elder statesman

It was, perhaps, these ups and downs that made Nelson a prominent advocate for others.

He held the door open for the sorts of folks who had traditionally had a hard time breaking into country music. He has consistently showcased artists and issues from just outside the bounds of traditional country, from early support for Black artist Charlie Pride and benefits for the United Farm Workers in the 1970s to his recording of the gay-themed “Cowboys are Frequently Secretly Fond of Each Other” in 2006. More recently, in a moment when country music’s gatekeepers have not been generous with women artists, Nelson has championed new voices like Kacey Musgraves, Margo Price and Allison Russell.

William Barber and Willie Nelson shared the podium during The Poor People’s Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival on July 31, 2021, in Austin, Texas. Rick Kern/Getty Images for MoveOn

Nelson has been an elder statesman for a very long time, but he has chosen to stay in the thick of things, even as the wheels on the bus begin to slow. Members of the Family Band that traveled so many miles with him have been exiting the stage of late: Bee Spears died in 2011, Jody Payne in 2013, Paul English in 2020 and sister Bobbie in 2022. Nelson’s sons Lukas and Mikah have often joined the band in the meantime, as has Paul’s brother Billy English.

Things change, seasons pass, but there is continuity, too, in Nelson’s world.

He reminds us that eccentricity is among the most traditional of country music’s verities. In a single concert, the joking wink to mortality of “Roll Me Up and Smoke Me When I Die” can share the set with a rousing gospel closer, Nelson singing “Will the Circle Be Unbroken?” or “I’ll Fly Away” as he points skyward, imploring the audience to join in on what he calls “the big finish.”

Jason Mellard, Director of the Center for Texas Music History, Texas State University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license.