Even the Gorillas and Bears in Our Zoos Are Hooked on Prozac

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In May 1950 Henry Hoyt and Frank Berger, researchers at a small pharmaceutical company in New Jersey, submitted a patent application for a substance called meprobamate. They were impressed with the way the drug relaxed muscles in mice and calmed their notoriously testy lab monkeys: “We had about 20 rhesus and java monkeys. They’re vicious, and you’ve got to wear thick gloves and a face guard when you handle them. After they were injected with meprobamate though, they became very nice monkeys—friendly and alert. Where they wouldn’t previously eat in the presence of human beings, they now took grapes from your bare hand.”

The drug caused such relaxation in the monkeys that it prompted researchers to wonder if meprobamate, which would soon be called Miltown, might be a productive complement to psychoanalysis in people.

At the same time, a pharmacist at the French company Rhône-Poulenc screened a new drug, called chlorpromazine, for behavioral effects on rats. To reach a platform with food on it, the rats simply had to climb a rope. The drugged rats didn’t climb the rope, even when they learned that a shock was coming.

Excerpted from Animal Madness: How Anxious Dogs, Compulsive Parrots, and Elephants in Recovery Help Us Understand Ourselves

They seemed totally indifferent: They weren’t concerned with the shock or the food. And it wasn’t because they were sedated or uncoordinated; they were wide awake and physically unimpaired.

At Sainte-Anne Hospital in Paris in the early 1950s, doctors began giving chlorpromazine to patients with delirium, mania, confusion, and psychosis. The drug didn’t sedate these people or put them to sleep as other sedatives had done. Instead, patients on chlorpromazine were aware and, like the rats, indifferent to the outside world but could engage with it when needed.

In 1954 Rhône-Poulenc sold the U.S. chlorpromazine license to Smith Kline, which named the drug Thorazine. The market for the new drug was mind-boggling, generating $75 million in sales in its first year.

Miltown went to market in 1955 and became the fastest-selling drug in U.S. history. By 1957 more than 36 million Miltown prescriptions had been filled and a billion tablets manufactured. Tranquilizers accounted for one-third of all prescriptions in the United States, and the drug was active in redefining the very idea of what anxiety was and who could suffer from it.

The Gorilla Who Got Thorazine in His Coca-Cola

One of the first nonhumans to be given psychopharmaceuticals as a patient (and not as a test subject) was a western lowland gorilla named Willie B., who was famous in Atlanta, Georgia. He was captured in Congo as an infant in the 1960s and sent to Zoo Atlanta, where he lived for 39 years, 27 of them alone in an indoor cage with a tire swing and a television.

According to Mel Richardson, who was working as a veterinarian at Zoo Atlanta at the time, Willie broke a glass window in his enclosure in the winter of 1970–71 and had to be transferred to a much smaller cage for six months while the glass was replaced with heavy metal bars.

“He weighed around 400 pounds, and the cage was way too small for him,” said Mel. “If he stood up and stretched each arm all the way out he could almost touch both sides of the cage at once.”

The vet staff put Thorazine in the Coca-Cola Willie drank in the morning. He responded to the drug as many institutionalized humans do: He shuffled back and forth across his cage with dulled eyes.

The vet staff decided to medicate him so that the six months would be more bearable. They put Thorazine in the Coca-Cola he drank in the morning. According to Mel, Willie responded to the drug as many institutionalized humans do: He shuffled back and forth across his cage with dulled eyes. “It was a little like watching the men in One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest,” Mel said.

Dolphins, whales, sea lions, walruses, and other marine creatures in parks like SeaWorld have also been given psychotropic drugs for what their vets see as depression, anxiety, compulsive regurgitation, flank sucking, or other distressing behaviors.

Two marine mammal veterinarians who have spent decades on staff or consulting for American animal-display facilities and the military’s marine mammal program told me that antidepressants and antipsychotics are commonly used but that “no one was going to talk to [me] about it.” Even they wouldn’t speak about the subject on the record.

The Polar Bear on Prozac

But we do know about Gus, one of the polar bears in the Central Park Zoo, who started compulsively swimming figure eights in his pool for up to 12 hours a day, every day, for months. When the zoo paid a behaviorist $25,000 to help him, something of a Gus moment took hold of the city. The bear was on the cover of Newsday, Letterman cracked jokes about him, and the Canadian band The Tragically Hip wrote a song called “What’s Troubling Gus?”

The zoo’s public affairs manager said that Gus’s story was so captivating because “it’s like Woody Allen always being in therapy—the idea that all New Yorkers are neurotic.” In the wake of the news coverage, people called in from around the country to ask how the bear was doing.

Gus lived in a 5,000-square-foot enclosure—less than .00009 percent of what his range in the Arctic would be. He was a major predator who, despite being born in captivity, no doubt still felt predatory impulses.

The answer was complicated. Gus lived in a 5,000-square-foot enclosure—less than .00009 percent of what his range in the Arctic would be. He was also a major predator who, despite being born in captivity, no doubt still felt predatory impulses.

In fact when Gus first arrived from an Ohio zoo in 1988, his favorite game was stalking children from the underwater window in his pool. “He liked to see them scream and run in terror—it was a game,” the zoo’s animal supervisor told a reporter. But the zoo staff didn’t want Gus to scare children or their parents, so they put up barriers to keep visitors farther away from the window. Gus soon started to swim in endless figure eights.

Hoping to curb the neurotic behavior, the zoo hired Tim Desmond, an animal trainer who had trained the orca who played Willy in the film Free Willy. Desmond was able to reduce Gus’s compulsions by giving him new things to do, such as bear food puzzles or snacks that took him longer to eat: mackerel frozen in blocks of ice or chicken wrapped in rawhide.

The zoo redesigned his exhibit and installed a play area stocked with rubber trash cans and traffic cones that Gus could pretend-maul. They also put him on Prozac. I do not know how long he was on the drug, or even if it was as effective as his new exhibit and entertainment schedule, but eventually Gus’s compulsive swimming tapered off, though it never went away entirely.

The Gorillas Who Got Haldol, Valium, Klonopin, Zoloft, Paxil, Xanax, Buspar, Prozac, Ativan, Versed, Mellaril, and Beta-Blockers

Another case involves a whole troop of gorillas at the Franklin Park Zoo in Boston.

In 1998 a 12-year-old male gorilla named Kitombe arrived at the zoo. The first week there, introductions between Kit and the other gorillas went smoothly. But soon Kit became violent. He also quickly impregnated one of the female gorillas, Kiki.

Kit was deeply agitated about the pregnant Kiki and wouldn’t let any of the other gorillas in the exhibit near her. His ire was focused in particular on a 36-year-old female named Gigi, who was the oldest gorilla in the troop.

As Kit chased Gigi around the exhibit, she screamed and shook. He bit her, tried to drown her in the exhibit’s moat, and tore open her scalp from ear to ear. Gigi, an already anxiety-prone gorilla given to repeatedly regurgitating and reingesting her food, eating her own feces, and sometimes slamming it on the glass of the exhibit in front of visitors, became a nervous wreck.

The drugs gave Kit diarrhea and slowed him down a bit, but they didn’t make him less aggressive. The keepers weaned him off the Haldol and Prozac and started him on Zoloft, which didn’t work either.

After two months of this, Dr. Hayley Murphy, the head veterinarian at the time, found her way to Michael Mufson, a psychiatrist and assistant professor at Harvard Medical School.

To treat Kit, Mufson prescribed Prozac and increasing dosages of the antipsychotic Haldol. The drugs gave Kit diarrhea and slowed him down a bit, but they didn’t make him less aggressive. The keepers weaned him off the Haldol and Prozac and started him on Zoloft, which didn’t work either. They tried one last antipsychotic, risperidone, but after a few months with no change in the frequency of his attacks on Gigi, Kit was separated from the troop and put in a cement and steel holding area by himself. Sadly, this isolation period would last more than 10 years.

Mufson was more hopeful about his ability to help Gigi. He prescribed her a beta-blocker, the same drug that concert pianists take for nerves. She was on it for three months without much of an effect. Mufson then decided to try a combination of Xanax and Paxil. Gigi soon seemed slightly less anxious, but Kit still intimidated and bullied her. What actually worked was removing the violent gorilla from the rest of the troop, even if that didn’t help him. In the wake of Kit’s exile, Gigi was weaned off the drugs.

After their experiences at the zoo in Boston, Murphy and Mufson were curious about the use of psychopharmaceuticals in other captive gorillas, so they surveyed all U.S. and Canadian zoos with gorillas in their collections. Nearly half of the 31 institutions that responded had given psychopharmaceutical drugs to their gorillas. The most frequently prescribed were Haldol (haloperidol) and Valium (diazepam), though Klonopin, Zoloft, Paxil, Xanax, Buspar, Prozac, Ativan, Versed, and Mellaril had all been tried.

Mufson keeps photos of the Boston gorilla troop on his desk alongside pictures of his wife and children, and every year, he brings medical students on psychiatry rotations to the zoo to see the apes. Since he first began working with Gigi, Mufson has treated a number of gorillas in other American zoos. He also agitates for changes in their environments and daily routines.

Excerpted from Animal Madness: How Anxious Dogs, Compulsive Parrots, and Elephants in Recovery Help Us Understand Ourselves by Laurel Braitman. Copyright ©2014 by Laurel Braitman. Reprinted by permission of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

Homepage image: Lennart Tange/Flickr

The Man Who’ll Stop at Nothing to Bring Free Internet to the World

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The fight to bring the entire planet online has reached new extremes. On one hand, we have Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Internet.org, the non-profit he founded to bring the developing world online through drone and satellite technology. On the other, we have Google, which is spending millions to acquire its own drone and satellite operations while also working to stream internet access from high-altitude balloons.

And then there’s Kosta Grammatis.

Though far from the most formidable entrant in this race, the young entrepreneur is no less serious about his mission. As founder and CEO of a non-profit called A Human Right, Grammatis has since 2009 been developing a variety of projects to expand internet access around the world. In 2010, he launched BuyThisSatellite.org, which sought funding to purchase a satellite that could beam internet connections to those without them. Two years later, MoveThisCable.org successfully lobbied a telecom company to reroute an underwater fiber optic cable so it could bring the remote South Atlantic island of St. Helena online.

Now Grammatis is on to what may be his most ambitious project yet.

Kosta Grammatis. Oluvus

Oluvus, his latest startup, is a new kind of telecom that hopes to make money by giving away—yes, for free—internet access in the US and use any profits to support connectivity projects in the developing world. It plans to use the “freemium” model, where you give away basic services and encourage people to pay for additional stuff. The idea is that this will be successful enough to bootstrap a whole new online universe on the other side of the globe.

It’s a lofty—potentially impossible—goal. But what Grammatis lacks in money and size, he makes up for in good intentions. After all, both Facebook and Google also see massive business opportunities in expanding the internet and, therefore, their own services. Grammatis, on the other hand, is unlikely to get rich from this. His motivation is purely altruistic, stemming from a fundamental belief that access to the internet is, quite simply, a human right. “I’m a strong believer that people are responsible for their own plight in some ways,” he says. “And if you give them the right tools, they can help themselves.”

The Long Road to Oluvus

Grammatis first became interested in connecting the unconnected world while participating in a think tank called Palomar 5. The goal of the think tank was to build technology to address some of the world’s biggest problems. Over time, the group agreed that many of these challenges, from gender inequality to education to freedom of expression, could be improved with greater access to the Internet, and its vast wealth of information. “We realized how people around the world, and I’m talking about in America too, benefit from knowledge and are empowered by information, so they can start to solve those problems, themselves,” he says.

At first, Grammatis, who worked as an engineer for SpaceX before launching A Human Right, wanted to design a satellite system for the developing world, but quickly realized that would be a multi-billion dollar endeavor. It would be cheaper, he believed, to bid on the Terrestar-1 satellite that was auctioned after its parent company went bankrupt. He knew other bankrupt companies had sold their satellites for pennies on the dollar. In the end, however, BuyThisSatellite.org cobbled together just $67,096, a mere sliver of the $1.375 billion Dish Network paid to acquire Terrestar-1.

Still, Grammatis was undeterred. In 2012, he started a project called the Bandwidth Bank, an attempt to get major telecom companies to donate their unused bandwidth to those who could use it. “A little known fact about internet access is there’s plenty of unused connectivity,” he says. “Spectrum’s a public thing. It should be available for people to use if it’s not being used.”

‘I’m a strong believer that people are responsible for their own plight in some ways. And if you give them the right tools, they can help themselves.’

But the project was a failure. “It almost killed me,” Grammatis admits. Telecom companies were largely unreceptive to the idea. And yet, that failure is what led Grammatis to launch Oluvus. “I had worked with so many telecom companies, and it was such a challenge to get anything to happen to make this vision of internet as a public good come to life,” he remembers. “I started thinking: ‘What would my dream telecommunications company look like?’”

Oluvus, he says, is the embodiment of that dream. The startup, still very much in its conceptual phases, is not building its own infrastructure. Instead, Oluvus is essentially buying bandwidth wholesale from an established telecom company (Grammatis can’t publicly announce which one just yet). It will then offer free mobile data plans to people in the US, giving customers the option to pay more for additional services.

Profits will fund connectivity projects that can improve gender equality, education, disaster relief, health, and freedom of expression around the world. The first project will take place in Kenya’s Dadaab Refugee Camp. Grammatis hopes that aligning Oluvus with a cause will help distinguish it from what many believe to be a greedy telecommunications industry. “It’s a provider, but it’s also a cause,” he says. “We think our customers will be excited to be part of a community, not just a customer.”

The Challenges Ahead

According to Ben Goldhirsh, co-founder and CEO of the media company GOOD and an investor in Oluvus, it’s a smart marketing strategy. “If Kosta wasn’t an intention-driven dude and was just a financially motivated business guy, I think he might have arrived at this strategy anyway to cut through the marketing clutter,” he says.

That said, even Goldhirsh admits there are substantial challenges ahead. Even if you don’t own the infrastructure, starting a new telecom company is a huge endeavor. Building consumer awareness about Oluvus, for one, likely will cost millions. So far, the startup raised $250,000 to prove its feasibility, and Grammatis is looking to raise more. Plus, Goldhirsh points out, Oluvus will be highly dependent on whatever telecom it partners with. “Anytime your business stands between another creator and the consumer, it’s exciting because you don’t have to execute a lot of the components yourself,” he says. “But at the same time, there’s a lot to the value proposition that you don’t control.”

That goes without mentioning that Oluvus’s very mission depends on customers opting to pay for the service, rather than get it for free. Even if Oluvus does land paying customers, the most likely scenario is not that it will become the next big telecom juggernaut, but that it will become an example for other players, like Facebook and Google, who have the financial and technological brawn to scale these projects. “If he is able to demonstrate a successful working model, Facebook may say: ‘Instead of us doing all this research, let’s have Kosta help us,’” says Amir Dossal, an Oluvus advisor who spent 25 years at the United Nations before launching the Global Partnerships Forum.

Grammatis, for one, says he’s spoken with both Internet.org and Google and would love to collaborate on a project. He says doesn’t care who ultimately gets credit for bringing the world online. What’s important is that it gets done. “You can give a man a fish, and feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish, and feed him for a lifetime,” Grammatis says. “But give the man the internet, and he can teach himself to fish and anything else he wants to do.”

We Need This: A Maps App That Algorithmically Finds You the Scenic Route

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Here’s something nice: Researchers working out of a Yahoo lab in Barcelona are building a maps application that doesn’t just spit out the fastest path from A to B but instead endeavors to show you the most enjoyable one. What a concept! Is it too much to ask that the entire tech industry follow their lead?

The paper describing the effort, published last week, begins by stating what we already know: Today’s maps are very good at what they do. “When providing directions to a place, web and mobile mapping services are all able to suggest the shortest route,” our researchers write. This group had something different in mind–a map that can “automatically suggest routes that are not only short but also emotionally pleasant.”

The researchers–Daniele Quercia and Luca Maria Aiello from Yahoo!, and Rossano Schifanella from University of Torino, in Italy—started with crowdsourced data. Web users were shown two photographs of London streets and asked to choose which looked “more beautiful, quiet, and happy.” The researchers then aggregated those winning locations to create a new map of London–an alternate cartography weighted for human emotion. In tests, participants found that routes drawn from this map were indeed more pleasant, while adding just a few minutes to travel time.

Efficiency isn’t everything. We have the phrase “scenic route” for a reason.

The idea may be obvious, but it isn’t necessarily familiar. Thus far, the age of algorithms, data, and connectivity has been sold on the promise of efficiency. Silicon Valley is obsessed with doing more, faster, and our digital tools are built in its image. At one point, it was enough to be able put in your Chinese order online; now you can have a dude on a bike stop by pick it up for you. Next year, no doubt you’ll be able to wiggle your finger at your phone and get spring rolls air dropped to your apartment in minutes.

The cult of efficiency may not have any idol more awesome than Google Maps, which has made the world more knowable–and navigable–than ever before. It’s an incredible achievement by Google and its partners, and it’s an indispensable tool for the rest of us.

Still, efficiency isn’t everything. We have the phrase “scenic route” for a reason, and as Google’s driving directions increasingly become the only directions any of us ever think about checking, we risk losing sight of these alternate paths. That’s a shame. As this research shows, they’re often preferable. We should hope that the people building the next generation of apps and services spend more time considering these alternatives, whatever form they make take.

The Yahoo research offers a good template for how we might start to think about this challenge. For one, their project doesn’t upturn the underlying idea of routing–it just rejiggers it. The aim isn’t to turn every errand into a walking tour, it’s just to get you where you’re going a little more enjoyably. The only radical bit—which, of course, isn’t really radical at all—is the notion that we might be willing to trade a few minutes for a more pleasant experience overall. It’s still efficient, just with a dash of humanity.

It’s still efficient, just with a dash of humanity.

Smarter yet, the researchers are already exploring how you could do the whole thing at scale, algorithmically. The second phase of their experiment substituted Flickr data for the initial set of human-sorted images, the idea being that people are more likely to take pictures of interesting buildings and pretty streets than car-choked thoroughfares. Looking at 3.7 million photos of London and 1.3 million of Boston, they developed new maps computationally with promising results. In a Boston trial, a group of 50-some participants preferred the algorithmically generated routes to the shortest one every time.

Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem like today’s mapmakers are overly concerned with finding the “beautiful, quiet, and happy” routes through life. Instead, Apple and Google are focusing their energies on the the map wars’ latest frontier—indoors—with both companies scrambling to survey the places satellites haven’t yet been able to reach. To them, the dream is not just guiding you to the mall but directly to the store you’re looking for–and eventually, in retail establishments of a certain size, to the very item you desire. In other words: more exactitude, greater efficiency.

For their part, the researchers in Barcelona are currently building their own application. They want to refine their algorithms by getting them in peoples’ hands. The challenge there, of course, is getting people to try a new maps app in the first place. But who knows, as apps open up in new ways–say, with the arrival of “extensibility” in the next version of iOS–maybe we’ll someday be able to plug a third-party “scenic route” option right into Google Maps ourselves.

In any event, this sort of thinking is refreshing, and it could be fruitful in applications well beyond maps. Companies always talk about evoking emotions like “joy” and “delight” with their apps, but far too often they’re treated like byproducts, happy results of a well-polished UI. The far greater challenge is figuring out how we can incorporate these emotions into the basic functionality of our digital tools. It starts by acknowledging that the fastest route isn’t always the best one.

Bringing Ceramic Sculptures to Life by Smashing Them to Pieces

In his photo series started in 2003, Martin Klimas makes ceramic statuettes come to life as they shatter on the ground. Photo: Martin Klimas

In his photo series started in 2003, Martin Klimas makes ceramic statuettes come to life as they shatter on the ground.

Photo: Martin Klimas

The camera is triggered by the sound made the moment the figurines hit the ground. Photo: Martin Klimas

The camera is triggered by the sound made the moment the figurines hit the ground.

Photo: Martin Klimas

The German photographer acquired the figures from an Asian supermarket at first, but then started ordering them online and even received donations. Photo: Martin Klimas

The German photographer acquired the figures from an Asian supermarket at first, but then started ordering them online and even received donations.

Photo: Martin Klimas

The destroyed figures seem to come to life with a new kinetic energy as they break apart. Photo: Martin Klimas

The destroyed figures seem to come to life with a new kinetic energy as they break apart.

Photo: Martin Klimas

The shots must be precisely timed so that they capture the objects at the exact moment when they're clearly falling apart, but still retain enough of their original form. Photo: Martin Klimas

The shots must be precisely timed so that they capture the objects at the exact moment when they're clearly falling apart, but still retain enough of their original form.

Photo: Martin Klimas

Klimas estimates he's gone through hundreds of figures in the course of making the series. Photo: Martin Klimas

Klimas estimates he's gone through hundreds of figures in the course of making the series.

Photo: Martin Klimas

He drops the figures from four meters up at his studio. He used to do this in his home. Photo: Martin Klimas

He drops the figures from four meters up at his studio. He used to do this in his home.

Photo: Martin Klimas

Sound is a key factor in this series, as well as several others that Klimas has made. Part of what inspires his work is the idea of rendering sound visible. Photo: Martin Klimas

Sound is a key factor in this series, as well as several others that Klimas has made. Part of what inspires his work is the idea of rendering sound visible.

Photo: Martin Klimas

“For me an important moment is when the object becomes transparent,” Klimas says. “When you see only splatters and parts but the original object is still visible. You get the feeling you can see inside the things. Also in the instant of its destruction, the boring porcelain figurine reaches its absolute peak of vitality.” Photo: Martin Klimas

“For me an important moment is when the object becomes transparent,” Klimas says. “When you see only splatters and parts but the original object is still visible. You get the feeling you can see inside the things. Also in the instant of its destruction, the boring porcelain figurine reaches its absolute peak of vitality.”

Photo: Martin Klimas

The series began in 2002 with everyday objects like coffee cans and wine bottles. Later, Klimas started photographing exploding vases and other fragile objects. Photo: Martin Klimas

The series began in 2002 with everyday objects like coffee cans and wine bottles. Later, Klimas started photographing exploding vases and other fragile objects.

Photo: Martin Klimas

Although kits are available to set off cameras with microphones, Klimas uses a trigger system built for him by his brother in 2003. Photo: Martin Klimas

Although kits are available to set off cameras with microphones, Klimas uses a trigger system built for him by his brother in 2003.

Photo: Martin Klimas

The images reward close inspection, revealing a chaotic swirl of atomized ceramics around the areas where the breaks are occurring. Photo: Martin Klimas

The images reward close inspection, revealing a chaotic swirl of atomized ceramics around the areas where the breaks are occurring.

Photo: Martin Klimas

The disintegrating ceramics in Martin Klimas’ series Porcelain Figurines burst with more energy than their fragile bodies can handle, shattering into shards and dust with a strange dignity.

The photographer drops the statuettes from a height of 4 meters in his Düsseldorf studio, using the explosive sound of their impact to trigger his camera and make the photo. The technique produces a sense of great energy and emotion, giving otherwise static figurines new life in the moment of their destruction.

“For me an important moment is when the object becomes transparent,” Klimas says. “When you see only splatters and parts but the original object is still visible. You get the feeling you can see inside the things. Also in the instant of its destruction, the boring porcelain figurine reaches its absolute peak of vitality.”

The resulting images reward close inspection. While the large pieces are interesting on their own, look deeper and you’ll see a maelstrom of atomized ceramics that show just how violent these events are.

The concept for this series dates to 2002, when Klimas began experimenting with everyday objects like coffee cans and wine bottles. He later started photographing exploding vases and other fragile objects. Everything he destroys are cheap, mass-produced tchotchkes, which is good because making compelling photos requires a lot of repetition. “The first ones I bought in Asian supermarkets. Later I imported them directly from China, and also ended up getting donations,” Klimas says. “Over the years it must’ve been hundreds of pieces.”

Sound is critical not just to this series, but to much of Klimas’s work. It adds another layer to the series, as it makes you contemplate the sound created by the impact. Other projects by the photographer seek to visualize sound, whether with paint or sand. His interest in the aural realm stems from his early interest in the saxophone, a career path he eventually left behind.

“After that I turned my focus to painting and drawing,” he says. “Finally I found my destiny in photography. My intent was always to continue in the associative depiction of sound. I wanted to transform sound directly into images.”

It’s hard to lament the figurines destroyed in the series. They’ve been given a value beyond anything they might have otherwise held, and in the long run they probably would end up in pieces anyway. At least this way, each piece lives on in what is almost certainly the most interesting moment of its existence.

“It seems the figurine comes alive,” Klimas says, “and was waiting for this moment all of its life.”

All photos by Martin Klimas

What’s Up With That: Why You Always Seem to Choose the Slowest Line

Chinese shoppers queue at a supermarket in Hefei, east China Anhui province in 2010. STR/AFP/Getty Images

You run into the grocery store to quickly pick up one ingredient. You grab what you need and head to the front of the store. After quickly sizing up the check-out lines, you choose the one that looks fastest.

You chose wrong. People you could swear got in other lines long after you chose yours are already checked out and headed to the parking lot. Why does this seem to always happen to you? What kind of a cruel universe would allow such a thing to happen? It’s not fair!

Well, as it turns out, it’s just math that is working against you.

When you’re selecting among several lines at the grocery store, the odds are not in your favor. Chances are, the other line really is faster. Mathematicians who study the behavior of lines are called queueing theorists, and they’ve got the numbers to prove this. Their models also underlie a diverse set of modern problems, including traffic engineering, factory design, and internet infrastructure. At the same time, queueing theory provides a fairer way to checkout at the store. The only problem is that many customers don’t like it.

What's Up With That

Each week, we'll explain the science behind a strange phenomenon that you may be wondering about, or may be hearing about for the first time right here. If you've seen or heard of something you'd like us to explain, send us an email.

Why Toothpaste and Pine Nuts Can Make Some Foods Taste Disgusting

Why Earphone Cords Are Always Tangled

Before we get into that, we need to start at a somewhat unexpected place: the Copenhagen telephone exchange. In the early 1900s a young engineer named Agner Krarup Erlang was trying to figure out the optimal number of phone lines for the city’s switchboard. This is back in the day when operators were actual physical human beings and they connected telephone calls by plugging a jack into a circuit.

To save on labor and infrastructure, Erlang wanted to know the minimum number of lines that would be necessary to make sure that pretty much everyone’s calls could get connected. For a really cheap switchboard, you could have just one line. But then making a call would be a horrendous ordeal for customers, who would have to wait behind anyone else trying to talk at the same time. And having a line for each of the city’s thousands of telephones also doesn’t make practical sense.

Let’s look at a simplified example. If the Copenhagen switchboard has to deal with an average of two phone calls per hour, you might expect that two lines could suffice. But this fails to take into account the fact that there will be some hours when there are more calls, and some hours with less. During a very busy time, the switchboard might receive five requests for connections. With two lines, it can only provide calls for two customers, putting the rest on hold. If the Danes are particularly chatty, these calls could last an hour, meaning that more calls will arrive in the meantime, and the entire system will quickly back up.

Erlang devised equations that took into account the average number of phone calls in a given hour and the average amount of time for each call. Using his calculations in the simple example above, the Copenhagen telephone exchange would find out that they need seven lines to make sure that 99 percent of all calls would be connected right away. In 1909, Erlang published a paper with his findings, creating a new branch of mathematics called queueing theory.

Today, queueing theory finds use in many different places. Corporations with call centers, for instance, may often use the tenets of queueing theory to handle customer problems. The most basic problems, which are common, are handled by relatively unskilled but numerous representatives. More complex problems are passed up to a fewer number of people with more training. To determine the optimal number of each type of representative, a call center can use Erlang’s findings and not, as is commonly believed, a random number determined by the prince of darkness.

So back to those jerks at the supermarket who made it out ahead of you. Queueing theory explains why there’s probably no way you can always be in the fastest line. A grocery store tries to have enough employees at the checkout lines to get all their customers through with minimum delay. But sometimes, like on a Sunday afternoon, they get super busy. Because most grocery stores don’t have the physical space to add more checkout lines, their system becomes overwhelmed. Some small interruption—a price check, a particularly talkative customer—will have downstream effects, holding up the entire line behind them.

If there are three lines at the store, these delays will happen randomly at different registers. Think about the probability. The chances of your line being that fastest one are only one in three. Which means you have a two-thirds chance of not being in the fastest line. So it’s not just in your mind: Another line is probably moving faster than yours.

Now, queueing theorists have come up with a good solution to this problem: Just make all customers stand in one long snaking line, called a serpentine line, and serve each person at the front with the next available register. With three registers, this method is about three times faster on average than the more traditional approach. This is what they do at most banks, Trader Joe’s, and some fast-food places. With a serpentine line, a long delay at one register won’t unfairly punish the people who lined up behind it. Instead, it will slow everyone down a little bit.

So why don’t most places encourage serpentine lines? Here, we’re getting into customer psychology. We human beings like to think that we’re in control of our lives and can beat the system if given the chance. Researchers have noted that some customers balk at serpentine lines, which can stretch much longer than the more traditional approach, preferring their chances of winning the lottery with multiple lines.

Queueing theory has grown to more than just math, incorporating these psychological aspects to waiting in line. The reason that elevator lobbies often have floor-to-ceiling mirrors is that they help alleviate the boredom of waiting for the next lift. Lines at an amusement park like Disneyland incorporate all sorts of diversions—like changing backgrounds, progression through different rooms, and video screens—to keep park-goers preoccupied and feeling like they are making progress toward a goal while standing for two hours to get on a five-minute ride. Smart phones are probably the greatest boon to modern line designers. Pretty much anyone can now kill time by playing games, checking social media, or browsing the internet while waiting.

Finally, just to prove that the most rational choice isn’t always the best one, there’s this amusing anecdote from prominent queueing researcher Richard Larson of MIT. During a queueing theory conference, Larson said that a hotel lobby was once clogged with queueing theorists attempting to check in to their rooms. The mathematicians decided to take matters into their own hands and form a serpentine line to handle the volume.

But, as Larson told Slate in 2012: “The lobby wasn’t designed for it and it looked extremely messy. The hotel manager was unhappy. If we’d just dispersed into six parallel lines at the checkout desk the wait might have been shorter and less chaotic. But it would have been less fair.”

The Next Big Thing You Missed: Saving the World’s Coffee Supply by Acting Like a Tech Company

Courtesy of Thrive

Michael Jones is on a mission to save coffee.

The self-described serial entrepreneur says that swift action is required to ensure ready access to the world’s favorite way of consuming caffeine. Earlier this year in Brazil, a drought created a coffee shortage that sent prices soaring, but Jones believes there’s another chronic problem that could limit the global coffee-bean supply: the pay for growing coffee sucks, and farmers are giving up. “This isn’t sustainable,” Jones says. “The people who like coffee are going to pay a whole lot more for it because there’s nobody to produce it. And the quality stuff starts to go away.”

Michael Jones. Courtesy of Thrive

The paradox, he says, is that even though demand for coffee, especially premium coffee, has risen over the last decade, and the price U.S. consumers are willing to pay along with it, farmers are still getting out of the business at an alarming rate. But Jones believes he has a solution. He wants to put more money in farmers’ pockets by purging the coffee supply chain of what he describes as needless networks of middlemen who stand between growers and consumers.

‘All the people with the power to change what’s wrong were benefitting from the way it was.’

To make that happen, Jones co-founded Thrive Farmers Coffee with a fellow Atlantan, Kenneth Lander, an attorney who had retired to Costa Rica to live out a dream of growing coffee in the tropics, only to discover what a lousy living it really was. The three-year-old company creates a direct pipeline from farms to U.S. roasters, cafés, and coffee drinkers that Jones claims can double farmers’ revenue—an approach to “disintermediation” at the heart of high-tech businesses from Uber to Warby Parker to Amazon. “What you’re doing is what has to be done if coffee is going to survive,” says Jones, who has his own personal tie to the coffee business: his father-in-law farms coffee in Jamaica.

Better Coffee Through Transparency

Thrive works by aggregating farmers’ crops into lots that it either sells green to wholesale roasters or roasts itself and sells to coffee retailers or directly to consumers through its website. Farmers receive half the take for beans roasted by Thrive, or seventy-five percent for beans sold green. Thrive handles the sales, marketing, distribution, and packaging while enforcing quality standards Jones says farmers are incentivized to maintain because of the higher returns they receive compared to selling their beans through standard channels. He also says farmers receive complete, regular reports tracking exactly where their beans go and how much is being paid.

Whether or not the world’s coffee supply is truly in such dire straits, Jones already has a track record of hacking supply chains to cut waste. Before coffee, Jones was the founder of Implantable Provider Group (IPG), which works to cut the costs of implantable medical devices by buying in bulk and selling to hospitals. The pricing schemes in the medical device business, he says, suffered from the same inefficiencies as coffee. “All the people with the power to change what’s wrong were benefitting from the way it was,” he says.

Though Thrive isn’t a technology company per se, it exhibits the same sensibility, and even uses some of the same jargon. It calls itself a “platform” in its tag line. And the company professes much the same belief in the power of vertical integration as, say, Amazon does when it promises a better return to writers who sidestep traditional publishers to have their books directly edited, packaged, and sold through the site.

One of the most insidious drags Jones sees on farmers’ financial security is the way coffee is traded as a commodity, like corn or oil. He believes direct farm-to-cup sales make the volatile coffee futures market obsolete by allowing reliable consumer demand set stable prices. “The way coffee is going to be valued is based on what people are willing to pay for it here,” he says.

The Gravity of the Global Market

Jack Scoville, a veteran commodities broker and analyst who specializes in agricultural and tropical goods, including coffee, says he thinks a direct sales approach could work, especially in the premium market Thrive hopes to serve. He sees less of an opportunity in serving the mass-market Folgers of the world, which he says can roast a million pounds a day. (Thrive this year expects to move more than three million pounds of coffee beans from about 5,000 farms.)

Even in the boutique market, Scoville says, maintaining quality will be a challenge. “That’s hard to do when you deal with the same producers all the time,” he says. “Their quality goes up and down any given year, which just has to do with weather and other things like that. There isn’t a whole heck of a lot you can do.”

The important thing to Jones is getting the people who actually grow it a better cut.

Scoville also doubts that Thrive will really be able to escape the gravity of the global commodities market, which he believes is still the most efficient way to balance supply and demand. Thrive, he says, can set whatever prices it wants. But in the end the global price of a pound of coffee will still be its reference point. And if, as Jones hopes, the supply chain is stripped of middle men taking their cuts, Scoville says the market will simply absorb that change in cost structure as another data point in setting the price.

However much or little control Thrive ends up having over how much coffee costs, the important thing to Jones is getting the people who actually grow it a better cut. It’s just and fair, he says. But coffee drinkers also have a purely selfish stake in how the economics of the global coffee trade play out, he says, since it’s everyone’s morning cup on the line. “Even if you don’t have a heart, there’s a case for it.”

Microsoft’s Memo Isn’t News, But Its Plan to Work With Google Certainly Is

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella. Microsoft

All eyes were on the carefully designed—and carefully publicized—corporate memo from new CEO Satya Nadella. But that same morning, Microsoft released a far better illustration of the way Nadella has so significantly changed the way it operates.

At first blush, it doesn’t seem like much—one of those tech world announcements filled with arcane references to things like virtual machine clusters and open source contributions. But the announcement shows that, as Microsoft seeks to remake itself in a new world dominated by mobile devices and cloud computing services, the company is striving to ensure that it can work hand-in-hand with competing companies and technologies—at least in some cases. For a corporate giant that for so long insisted on doing things only in its own way—actively shunning popular software and services built outside the company—this is a major change in attitude. And it’s just what Microsoft needs.

The news—which arrived early Thursday morning, at the same moment as Nadella’s memo—was that Microsoft was putting its weight behind Kubernetes, a new tool that seeks to improve the convenience and efficiency of cloud computing services. This is significant not only because Kubernetes was created by Google—Microsoft’s biggest rival—but because it’s an open source software tool that only works with the open source Linux operating system, traditionally held up as the bête noire of Microsoft’s Windows OS. This shows that, as Nadella says, Microsoft sees its future in cloud computing and that the company fully realizes its success in this burgeoning area depends on dovetailing with the greater community of cloud companies and software projects—not just working against them.

“The way to look at it is: we want developers to be happy on the Azure platform,” Microsoft Azure Corporate Vice President Jason Zander tells WIRED. “Whatever type of workload or operating system or programming language they want to use, we want to make sure we can do a first class job for them.”

Microsoft took a major step in this direction about two years ago when it unveiled a new version of its Azure cloud computing service that could run not only Windows but Linux. Like Google’s Compute Engine or Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud or Rackspace’s Cloud Servers, Azure lets companies rent huge numbers of virtual servers where they can build and run their own websites and other software, and these companies now have the choice of loading Azure’s virtual machines with the open source operating system that has become a standard means of erecting online software. It’s still unclear how many companies are using Linux atop Azure. Zander declines to provide specific numbers. But he says “a lot of folks” are doing so, and the tech giant’s support for Kubernetes shows that it’s actively working to provide the tools companies need to take full advantage of the open source OS.

This is significant not only because Kubernetes was created by Google—Microsoft’s biggest rival—but because it only works with the open source Linux operating system, traditionally held up as the bête noire of Microsoft’s Windows OS.

Kubernetes is a way of juggling what are known as Docker containers. You can think of these as shipping containers for software. They let companies easily move software from machine to machine and from cloud service to cloud service, and when used in tandem with a tool such as Kubernetes, they can help improve the efficiency of software that runs across a wide array of machines. Many cloud computing providers are now embracing the Docker technology, seeing it as the next big thing in online computing infrastructure. Red Hat and IBM, for instance, are also backing Kubernetes. But Red Hat and IBM aren’t Microsoft.

What’s particularly interesting in the case of Nadella and company is that Docker containers only work with Linux. In fact, there’s not even a true equivalent to the technology on the standard version of Windows. “This would apply purely to Linux workloads,” says Craig Mcluckie, a product manager for Google’s cloud services. Nonetheless, Microsoft is working to ensure that Kubernetes can operate in tandem with Azure, and Zander says it will likely contribute code to the open source project that shares the Kubernetes software with the world at large. It may seem that, in doing so, Microsoft is undercutting its own operating system, but Microsoft’s future—and indeed, the future of the industry—is much greater than Windows.

The future is cloud computing, a world where businesses can run applications across not only on servers in their own data centers but across virtual machines served up by not one but many different services, from Azure to Google Compute Engine to Amazon EC2. As Google’s Mcluckie says, technologies such as Kubernetes and Docker can make all that happen, calling them a gateway to “multi-cloud environments,” and Microsoft agrees.

But at the same time, Microsoft has been running something similar to these technologies across the thousands of Windows machines that drive its own online infrastructure, Zander will tell you, and much like Kubernetes and Docker, these technologies will eventually trickle down to the rest of the world. “We have technologies that do absolutely work that way,” he says. “It’s the substrate of Azure.” In other words, Microsoft is both building its own technologies and working alongside technologies from others. And that is what breeds success in the modern age of computing.