The Viscous Frontier

Thu, 23 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Escherichia coli Bacterium (2021, revised 2022). Illustration by David S. Goodsell, RCSB Protein Data Bank. doi:10.2210/rcsb_pdb/goodsell-gallery-028.

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In May 1976 a Satawalese master navigator named Mau Piailug stood on the deck of a double-hulled Polynesian canoe in Honolua Bay, Maui, and prepared to sail to Tahiti. Sans compass, chronometer, and chart. The canoe was Hōkūleʻa, a replica of the voyaging craft that had carried Polynesians across the Pacific a thousand years earlier. Over the next thirty-four days Piailug would navigate her about two thousand three hundred nautical miles south-southeast to Papeete using the rising and setting positions of stars, the shape of ocean swells refracted off islands beyond the horizon, the colour of the water at dusk, and the behaviour of terns returning to land at evening.

JUMP on Aneesh Sathe

The Viscous Frontier

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