James' World 2

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When Philip Sontag first visited Antarctica as a Ph.D. student, he brought back an unusual souvenir: a huge bag of penguin feathers. And now, after a decade-long analysis, Sontag and his colleagues have figured out how to use such feathers to create a living map of the mercury contamination that increasingly threatens Southern Hemisphere wildlife.

Mercury is a common by-product of gold mining, a growing industry in several southern countries. The toxic metal accumulates as it moves up the food chain by binding with amino acids in animals and then infiltrating their central nervous systems, where it can inhibit neural growth. Tracking mercury exposure is crucial for monitoring an ecosystem—but merely sampling rocks, ice or soil for its presence tells little about how much is actually entering the food web.

Many predators, including penguins, have evolved ways to dispose of mercury. The chemical builds up in feathers that the birds regularly molt in large quantities. Sontag, now a polar researcher based at Rutgers University, and his colleagues hoped to use molted feathers to determine where penguins picked up the toxic substance. The scientists were surprised to find a very clear correlation between the feathers’ levels of mercury and of a carbon isotope called carbon-13; the latter varies based on geographic location and thus acts as an indicator of “where the penguins are feeding or where their breeding grounds are,” Sontag says. These findings, published in Science of the Total Environment, confirmed this connection in seven penguin species scattered across the Southern Ocean—a pattern suggesting they’re exposed to more mercury farther north, where the comparatively warmer environment leads to higher carbon-13 levels.

These findings suggest that penguins could function as mercury bioindicators: living trackers of environmental pollutants, says the study’s senior author John Reinfelder, a marine biologist at Rutgers. Rather than measuring the chemical itself in a snapshot of time and place, he says, measuring penguin feathers’ mercury levels tracks the substance’s movement through the oceanic food web. For instance, penguin species known to reside near one another had varying

mercury and carbon-13 levels because of their different migration and feeding patterns. These data could be modeled into a maplike database to help guide future projects on conservation and polar science research.

Scientists consider penguins promising candidates for such bioindicators, says marine scientist Míriam Gimeno Castells, a Ph.D. student at the Institute of Marine Science from the Spanish National Research Council, who was not involved in the study. The animals are midway through the food chain. They breed in colonies, so researchers can easily scoop up feathers from many different individuals. Additionally, every breeding season they undergo dramatic molts; the feathers they lose “will contain the mercury that has accumulated during the nonbreeding season,” Gimeno Castells says.

Sontag’s next steps are to collect newer feathers to experiment with, across different species, and to measure mercury in penguins’ blood and prey to compare with levels of the substance in their feathers.

And how are the penguins themselves doing with their current mercury levels? “We don’t believe penguins have been exposed to toxic levels as of yet,” Reinfelder says. “Yes, the penguins will be okay.”

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Marie and her husband started seeing a couples therapist when the early years of parenthood put a strain on their marriage. Their two kids were 3 years and 4 months old, respectively, when COVID lockdowns began, and the couple were both stressed out and overwhelmed. (Marie—not her real name—said she was the one doing the lion’s share of the child care while her husband worked from home.)

In therapy, when she’d bring up a challenge with her husband or her kids, the therapist frequently brought the conversation back to a topic that surprised Marie: her relationship with her parents. The therapist had determined that because that early relationship was marked by “insecure attachment,” Marie was struggling to form a secure attachment with her husband. “I have issues with my parents,” Marie admitted, but she didn’t see why the therapist was so fixated on her childhood. The therapist assigned Marie and her husband a book on attachment to read together, and Marie started, at the therapist’s encouragement, attending solo sessions with an individual therapist to work through her childhood issues. Marie described that period as “really going down a wormhole.” She was doing her best to “heal her attachment style,” as her therapist insisted, but none of that work seemed to help things at home.

Whether you’re hearing it from a therapist, as Marie did, or picking it up on one of the countless attachment-focused accounts on Instagram and TikTok, chances are if you’re a new parent, you’ve taken in messaging around the need to give your child a “secure attachment,” or the urgency of fixing your own attachment issues lest you pass them on to your kid. “Securely attached” kids, the theory goes, will be socially confident and have a strong sense of self. As adults, they’ll make friends easily and have healthy romantic relationships. In contrast, “anxiously attached” adults are driven by fear of rejection and abandonment and have tendencies toward codependency, while the “avoidantly attached” among us have difficulty sharing feelings and trusting others. Your co-worker who’s clingy at happy hour? Probably anxiously attached. The boyfriend who takes forever to return your texts? Classic avoidant, or so pop psychology would have it. There’s a powerful lure in the idea that it might be possible to parent your kid so effectively that you’ll encase them in psychological Bubble Wrap and safeguard them against whatever relationship challenges have plagued you.

But there’s a flip side to all this: the sense that if our own pasts are a liability, any wrong move might damage our kids for life. Nicole McNelis, a therapist who frequently works with new moms, told me that many of her clients bring these messages from social media into sessions, worrying, for example, that because they bottle-fed their baby, he’ll be insecurely attached. McNelis followed up on this example by clarifying that that’s not how parenting works; there’s no single practice that will determine the quality of your relationship with your kid.

If reading about attachment has helped you feel as if you better understand yourself or your partner, or if it’s guided you toward approaching your parenting or your friendships in a more thoughtful way, I’m so happy for you. But if the idea of attempting to “heal” your insecure attachment before finding true love fills you with despair, or if you’re frantically trying to give your own child the “right” attachment style, I’ve got good news for you: “Attachment styles” have the sheen of science, but underneath, it’s basically all vibes.

Attachment styles were first defined by Mary Ainsworth, a Canadian-American psychologist who developed the Strange Situation, a procedure she used in experiments carried out in Baltimore in the 1970s. In the Strange Situation, a child between 9 months and 3 years comes to the lab with their primary caregiver, and they’re admitted to a room set up as a living room with various toys. After a few moments, a stranger enters, and a few moments after that, the caregiver leaves briefly, then returns. The child’s response to their caregiver’s departure and return, Ainsworth posited, reveals their attachment style. Once a child’s attachment style has been “set,” by about age 3, the theory goes, it’s more or less fixed. The message to moms is clear: If you mess up your kids early, you’ve doomed them for life.

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For all the world’s linguistic diversity, human languages still obey some universal patterns. These run even deeper than grammar and syntax; they’re rooted in statistical laws that predict how frequently we use certain words and how long those words tend to be. Think of them as built-in guardrails to keep language easy to learn and use.

And now scientists have found some of the same patterns in whale vocalizations. Two new studies published this week show that, despite the vast evolutionary distance between us, humans and whales have converged on similar solutions to the problem of communicating through sound. “It strengthens the view that we should be thinking about human language not as a completely different phenomenon from other communication systems but instead think about what it shares with them,” says Inbal Arnon, a professor of psychology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and a co-author of one of the studies.

Arnon and her colleagues, whose paper was published on Thursday in Science, analyzed eight years of humpback whale song recordings from New Caledonia in the South Pacific—and found that they closely adhered to a principle called Zipf’s law of frequency. This mathematical-power law, a hallmark of human language, is observed in word-use frequencies: the most common word in any language shows up twice as often as the second most common, three times as often as the third most common, and so on.

Listen to the humpback whale songs:

But before they could analyze the recordings, the researchers had to identify the segments that were analogous to words (though, importantly, without semantic meaning) in a stream of otherworldly grunts, shrieks, and moans. They found themselves in the same predicament as a newborn baby—so naturally, that’s where they turned for guidance. Human infants “get this continuous acoustic signal,” Arnon says, “and they have to figure out where the words are.”

A baby’s strategy is simple: listen for unexpected combinations of sounds in adult speech. Whenever you identify one, you’ve probably located a boundary between words because those uncommon transitions are less likely to occur within words.

Incredibly, humpbacks may be using the same approach. When the researchers segmented whale songs based on these “transitional probabilities”—just as a human infant would—they fit Zipf’s law of frequency like a glove. On the other hand, 1,000 arbitrarily shuffled elements of the data came nowhere near a match, strongly suggesting the transitional probability results weren’t a product of random chance.“We were all dumbfounded,” says co-author Ellen Garland, a whale song expert at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland. “There was the possibility of discovering these same structures. Did we think we would? Hell no.”

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Bernie is the most courageous and honest politician we have ever had. He is well loved and admired. He speaks relentlessly and powerfully for so many. Thank you, Sir.

When younger generations find inspiration in these words, there may be hope for democracy.

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Senator Sanders

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Many new parents struggle to put their child to bed, tackling everything from endless cycles of wake-ups to challenging nap times. Rest assured, these nighttime woes won’t last forever. Parents can begin implementing solutions today that can have a lasting impact, beginning with learning how to approach their child’s sleep differently.

To help you understand how to best tackle your child’s sleep issues and help them get through the night, we spoke to pediatric sleep experts for their fool-proof tips for babies, toddlers, and preschoolers. With just a few adjustments to your routines, your little one may just drift off to dreamland in no time flat.

How You’re Sabotaging Your Newborn’s Sleep

It may be tempting to cuddle your newborn to sleep to avoid hearing them cry at night, but experts recommend to stop this practice by the time they reach 3 months. Parents spend too much time rocking and holding their infant in the beginning of the night, preventing their newborn from learning how to self-soothe and slowing the development of healthy sleep-wake patterns.1

“As a result, a baby learns to fall asleep with this help—and then when [they] wake up during the night [they] can’t get back to sleep alone,” says Judith Owens, MD, director of the Center for Pediatric Sleep Disorders at Boston Children’s Hospital.

During the first several weeks of your baby’s life, nearly anything goes as you attempt to get your baby to sleep however you can. However, by the time they reach 3 months old, experts recommend putting them down in their crib “drowsy but awake.” Although they’ll cry for a while, soon, your baby will learn to drift off without help.

Here are additional ways you may be sabotaging your newborn’s sleep and what to do instead, according to experts.

You nap on-the-go

As much as possible, have your baby nap in their crib. “If [they] often fall asleep in a stroller or a car seat, [they’re] going to associate motion with sleep and have a hard time nodding off without it,” says Jodi Mindell, PhD, associate director of the Sleep Center at The Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia.

Aim for at least half, though ideally more, of your baby’s naps to be in their bassinet or crib.

You feed during bedtime

When her son was a baby, Angela Mattke, MD, a pediatrician at the Mayo Clinic Children’s Center in Rochester, Minnesota, would breastfeed right before putting him down. “Because of this, whenever he’d wake during the night, he wouldn’t fall back asleep until I breastfed him,” she says.

At 8 months, when he was still waking three or four times a night, she decided to switch the routine and start sleep training. After a challenging week in which she gradually allowed her son longer times to calm himself before returning to the room—while not offering additional nursing, Dr. Mattke’s son learned to self-soothe.

You may be able to avoid this problem by finishing your baby’s final feeding before you start the bedtime routine. Also, try to feed your baby in a room they don’t typically sleep in so they don’t associate nursing with bedtime.

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