SÃO PAULO, BRAZIL — On a Tuesday after-
noon in early July, Alison Grace Martin, a
British artist and weaver, joined a steady
stream of Paulistanos along the elevated
freeway that curves through downtown São
Paulo. The two-mile “Minhocão” (named af-
ter a mythic “gigantic earthworm”) was
closed to cars that day. The only traffic was
on foot and bikes, skateboards and scooters.
Picnickers lounged on the median sipping
wine. Children ran after soccer balls. A re-
triever chased a coconut; a pit bull peed on
a pile of bamboo.
The bamboo — freshly cut and split intostrips about 20 feet long — had arrived with
Ms. Martin and the engineer James Solly,
who were leading an urban design work-
shop, “High Line Paulista,” inspired loosely
by Manhattan’s elevated greenway. Their
students for the week had carried the strips,
which would be put to use in an experi-
mental dome construction, like a barn-rais-
ing, but with bamboo.
Plans have long been in the works to turn
the Minhocão into a park. Since its opening
in 1971, the freeway has been the subject of
controversy: a concrete scar that bifurcat-
ed neighborhoods, smothering residents
with noise and pollution.
“It ripped apart the urban fabric,” said
Franklin Lee, from São Paulo, and director
of the workshop with his partner Anne Save
de Beaurecueil. In January, after years of
discourse and debate, the mayor, Bruno Co-vas, announced that the freeway would
eventually be deactivated, finally making
way for “Parque Minhocão.”
The goal of the workshop was to envisage
structures — woven from bamboo, a sus-
tainable and local resource — to provide
shade for the park, or structures that would
filter sunlight through roadway apertures
and onto the dark streetscape below. Ms.
Martin typically weaves small-scale paper
objects — a torus, a basket, a bikini — or me-
dium-size bamboo structures. Lately, her
work is attracting the attention of architects
and engineers, and she has begun to pursue
collaborations.
“She’s miles ahead, exploring shapes
we’ve never thought were possible,” said
Pedro Reis, who runs the Flexible Struc-
tures Laboratory at the Swiss Federal Insti-Top, students at the “High Line Paulista” workshop carrying a bamboo dome in São Paulo. Left, Alison Grace Martin, a British artist and weaver.PHOTOGRAPHS BY GABRIELA PORTILHO FOR THE NEW YORK TIMESThe Old Bamboo, Anew
By SIOBHAN ROBERTSThe weaver and artist Alison Grace Martin uses non-Euclidean
geometry to explore a flexible plant’s architectural potential.
TUESDAY, JULY 30, 2019D1
NSCIENCE MEDICINE TECHNOLOGY HEALTH
5 MEDICAL SCHOOLCalifornia offers debt
relief for doctors
willing to treat
Medi-Cal recipients.
3 IMMUNOLOGY
Would you want a
computer to know
your risk of H.I.V.
infection?
Few wonders of the sunless depths appear
quite so ghoulish or improbable as angler-
fish, creatures that dangle bioluminescent
lures in front of needlelike teeth. They are
fish that fish.
Typically, the rod of flesh extending from
the forehead glows at the tip. Anglerfish can
wiggle the lure to better mimic living bait.
Most species can open their mouths wide
enough to devour prey whole, using their
fangs not only as daggers but also as bars of
a cage. Some can open their jaws and stom-
achs so wide as to trap victims much larger
than themselves.
(Note: this portrayal applies only to fe-
male anglerfish. The males, with rare ex-
ceptions, are puny.)
Anglerfish came to the attention of sci-
ence in 1833, when a specimen of the bizarre
fish — a female — was found on the shores
of Greenland. Since then, scientists have
learned most of what they know by pulling
dead or dying specimens from nets. Life-
style clues have been sparse.
That is changing. In the past two decades,
deep-sea explorers have begun to catch
glimpses of the creatures in their own hab-
itats and have recorded with video cameras
a variety of surprising behaviors. In a first,
a recent expedition off the Azores caught
sight of a female and her tiny parasitic mate
locked in a procreative embrace.
“It was amazing,” Theodore W. Pietsch,
an emeritus professor at the University of
Washington in Seattle and a world authority
on anglerfishes, said of the video. “They’re
glorious, wonderful things that need our at-tention, and our protection.”
In 2014, Bruce H. Robison, a senior ma-
rine biologist at the Monterey Bay Aquar-
ium Research Institute in California, caught
sight of an anglerfish known as the black
seadevil while exploring the deep bay, and
he managed to record minutes of its enig-
matic swimming.
“Instead of examining dead fish, we’re
now doing behavioral studies,” he said in an
interview. “It’s a significant transition.”
Many kinds of anglerfish inhabit the
ocean. But most attention goes to deep-sea
variety. So far, scientists have identified 168
species of the strange, elusive fish.
The new videos add otherworldly drama
and insights to a sparse but fascinating
body of existing knowledge. In his 1964
book “Abyss,” Clarence P. Idyll, a fisheries
biologist at the University of Miami, said
the rod tips could glow in yellows, yellow-Ghouls of the Deep Caught on Tape!
Scary anglerfish are
increasingly being filmed in
their habitats by explorers.
By WILLIAM J. BROADCONTINUED ON PAGE D3Toby Walsh on the promises and pitfalls of the
embrace of artificial intelligence. Page 6.
Fighting ‘Killer Robots’
DEAN SEWELL FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES4 PHYS EDLifting weights to
strengthen the body,
and perhaps the
mind, too.
CONTINUED ON PAGE D6