Deviate summary

Imagine you and a friend are having an argument over dinner. The details don’t matter, but both of you are convinced that the other is misremembering a small fact. 

Not that long ago, you’d agree to disagree. Nowadays, you can whip out your smartphone and look up the truth. Such are the wonders of the Information Age. 

While growing up in Sacramento, California, Ben Anderson did all the typical things young boys do. He walked to school, played basketball, and rode his bike around the neighborhood. But what makes Ben so remarkable is that he did all this without his eyes.

At just three years old, Ben lost his sight to a rare form of cancer. Shortly after that, he began experimenting with new ways of navigating the world. He developed a strategy of clicking his tongue and listening carefully to the sounds reflecting off the surfaces around him. Essentially, he learned to see using echolocation, just like a bat.

It’s 1824, and Louis XVIII has a problem. People are complaining about his royal tapestry factory in Paris. The factory displays vibrant fabrics in its showroom. But whenever a nobleman buys thread to take home, something seems off about the colors. The greens aren’t as verdant and the reds aren’t as rich.

Michel Chevreul, the king's chemist, investigates the problem. At first, he suspects that the yarn is degrading over time, or that perhaps the factory is using cheap, low-quality dyes. But, after years of experiments, he presents a surprising finding: there’s nothing wrong with the thread or the dye.

In 1915, St. Petersburg was buzzing with excitement about a shocking new painting by Russian artist Kazimir Malevich. Some saw it as a daring gesture of the avant-garde. Others saw it as a crude insult to art itself. What did the controversial piece depict? A single black square.

Of course, gallery-goers perceived the painting as much more than its color and shape. They understood the work in context. They saw it in dialogue with other art movements, as a commentary on aesthetic theory, and as a strong personal statement.

In the summer of 2014, a Liberian man arrived at a hospital in Nigeria. He was sick. Very sick. So Dr Ameyo Adadevoh tested him for Ebola. Before the results were available, the Liberian government demanded that Adadevoh release the patient. Against everyone’s advice, she kept him in quarantine. 

Her defiant choice was controversial, but it ultimately saved thousands of lives when the results showed that the man did in fact have Ebola. So how did Adadevoh arrive at her decision? And why was it different from everyone else's?

In 1799, French soldiers campaigning through Egypt made an amazing find – an ancient stone with engraved writing in three scripts. It was dubbed the Rosetta Stone, and featured writing in ancient Greek, demotic Egyptian, and Egyptian hieroglyphics. 

Since linguists already knew ancient Greek, they were confident that deciphering the other two languages would be a breeze. But it wasn’t. Researchers struggled to make sense of the hieroglyphs. Since the glyphs were small pictures, translators assumed they were symbols that stood for whole words. Still, they couldn’t crack the code.

Imagine it’s two million years ago. You’re an early human ancestor, living with your fellow apes on the African savanna. You mostly spend your days foraging for food within the same area. Now, you could wander off and explore what’s over the next hill, but you don’t. Why not?

Well, for one, you don’t know what’s over there. Sure, there could be delicious berries, but it could also be a barren landscape filled with dangerous predators. Essentially, why risk the unknown when you’re safe and secure where you are?

Deep within the Valley Life Sciences building at the University of California, Berkeley, a team of scientists is hard at work. They watch their subject – a tiny cockroach – skittering back and forth across a table. Strange as it may seem, this little critter has a lot to teach.

The researchers want to know how this bug moves with such agility. It’s mostly out of curiosity, but the discoveries they make will be put to valuable use down the line. In fact, cockroach locomotion has already inspired this lab’s most notable creation: RHex, a bionic robot designed to crawl through combat zones.