James' World 2

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In 2034, a small craft will alight on a distant dune in a place called Shangri-la. This craft, called Dragonfly, will have traveled 746 million miles to eventually land on Saturn’s largest—and most alluring—moon, Titan.

Dragonfly is a radical new approach to studying other worlds. Rather than being bound to slowly creep over the surface, as our Mars rovers have been, it is a rotorcraft, capable of flying several miles at a time. It will hop around from place to place to help us better understand this strange land, where the atmosphere is nitrogen, the dunes are made from ice, the seas are liquid methane, and a potentially globe-wide water ocean may be buried deep below the frozen surface.

The planned Dragonfly mission, set to launch in four years, will include an impressive assortment of remote planetary exploration tools: several cameras that operate at different wavelengths to image the intriguing landscape, a small drill and scoop to collect samples, a mass spectrometer to determine the chemical makeup of those samples, a gamma-ray and neutron spectrometer to study the composition of the surface directly under the craft, and a suite of meteorological and geological sensors to record Titan’s weather patterns and search for evidence of larger-scale activity (such as cryovolcanoes that might spew liquid water instead of lava). This suite of gear will help us get our first true taste of what Titan is really like—and whether it might be holding any important solar system secrets, like whether life could be present beyond our own world.

To date, we have only sent one lonely mission to Titan. Launched in 1997, the Cassini spacecraft carried a small payload: the Huygens probe. While Cassini spent nearly two decades in orbit around Saturn, the Huygens probe lasted less than a month between deployment from its parent spacecraft and the end of its operations, a mere hour and a half after touchdown on Titan’s rugged surface.

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What future missions to Saturn’s moon Titan will reveal about the universe.

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The global ocean hit a new record temperature of 21.1 ºC in early April, 0.1 ºC higher than the last record in March 2016. Although striking, the figure (see ‘How the ocean is warming’) is in line with the ocean warming anticipated from climate change. What is remarkable is its occurrence ahead of — rather than during — the El Niño climate event that is expected to bring warmer, wetter weather to the eastern Pacific region later this year.

That means warmer-than-average ocean temperatures are likely to persist or even intensify, bringing with them more-extreme weather and marine heatwaves, which spell problems for marine life from corals to whales.

“We are probably looking at a string of record highs over the next year or so,” says Josh Willis, an oceanographer at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. “This coming year is gonna be a wild ride if the El Niño really takes off.”

The El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO) is a natural, cyclical climate pattern. During the El Niño phase, winds over the Pacific are weakened or reversed, allowing warm waters to slosh eastwards in the Pacific. El Niño tends to coincide with warmer years, both in the ocean and on land. The previous record of 21.0 ºC, for example, occurred during a very strong El Niño event.

ENSO is currently in a neutral phase, coming out of a rare extended three-year period of La Niña (the opposite phase to El Niño). But El Niño is expected to kick in this year: according to the World Meteorological Organization, there is a 60% chance of it developing between May and July, and an up to 80% chance of it happening by October.

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Warm oceans can bleach and kill corals. Credit: Juergen Freund/NPL

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Neuroscience has made progress in deciphering how our brains think and perceive our surroundings, but a central feature of cognition is still deeply mysterious: namely, that many of our perceptions and thoughts are accompanied by the subjective experience of having them. Consciousness, the name we give to that experience, can’t yet be explained — but science is at least beginning to understand it. In this episode, the consciousness researcher Anil Seth and host Steven Strogatz discuss why our perceptions can be described as a “controlled hallucination,” how consciousness played into the internet sensation known as “the dress,” and how people at home can help researchers catalog the full range of ways that we experience the world.

Steven Strogatz (00:03): I’m Steve Strogatz, and this is The Joy of Why, a podcast from Quanta Magazine that takes you into some of the biggest unanswered questions in math and science today. In this episode, we’re going to be discussing the mystery of consciousness. The mystery being that when your brain cells fire in certain patterns, it actually feels like something. It might feel like jealousy or a toothache, or the memory of your mother’s face, or the scent of her favorite perfume. But other patterns of brain activity don’t really feel like anything at all. Right now, for instance, I’m probably forming some memories somewhere deep in my brain. But the process of that memory formation is imperceptible to me. I can’t feel it. It doesn’t give rise to any sort of internal subjective experience at all. In other words, I’m not conscious of it.

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Peter Greenwood for Quanta Magazine

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With the help of an expert weaver, archaeologists have unraveled the design secrets behind the world’s oldest pants. The 3,000-year-old wool trousers belonged to a man buried between 1000 and 1200 BCE in Western China. To make them, ancient weavers combined four different techniques to create a garment specially engineered for fighting on horseback, with flexibility in some places and sturdiness in others.

The softer side of materials science

Most of us don’t think much about pants these days, except to lament having to put them on in the morning. But trousers were actually a technological breakthrough. Mounted herders and warriors needed their leg coverings to be flexible enough to let the wearer swing a leg across a horse without ripping the fabric or feeling constricted. At the same time, they needed some added reinforcement at crucial areas like the knees. It became, to some extent, a materials-science problem. Where do you want something elastic, and where do you want something strong? And how do you make fabric that will accomplish both?

For the makers of the world’s oldest pants, produced in China around 3,000 years ago, the answer was apparently to use different weaving techniques to produce fabric with specific properties in certain areas, despite weaving the whole garment out of the same spun wool fiber.

The world’s oldest-known pants were part of the burial outfit of a warrior now called Turfan Man. He wore the woven wool pants with a poncho that belted around the waist, ankle-high boots, and a wool headband adorned with seashells and bronze discs. The pants’ basic design is strikingly similar to the pants most of us wear today, but closer inspection reveals the level of engineering that went into designing them.

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Photo by Wagner et al. 2022

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For years, Emily Ury traversed North Carolina’s coastal roads, studying patches of skeletal trees slain by rising seas that scientists call “ghost forests.” Killed by intruding saltwater along the Atlantic Coast, they are previews of the dire fate other forests face worldwide.

Ury knew that ghost forests were expanding in the region, but only when she began looking down from above using Google Earth did she realize how extensive they were.

“I found so many dead forests,” says Ury, an ecologist at Duke University and co-author of a paper on the rapid deforestation of the North Carolina coast published in 2021 in the journal Ecological Applications. “They were everywhere.”

As the ocean intrudes and saltwater rises, it kills trees and creates these ghost forests—bare trunks, and stumps, ashen tombstones marking a once-thriving coastal ecosystem. In North Carolina, pine, red maple, sweet gum, and bald cypress forests are being replaced by salt marsh. Eventually, that salt marsh will be replaced by open water, a shift that leads to significant and complex costs to the environment and the local economy. The loss of forests will reduce carbon storage, further fueling climate change, and the agriculture industry and timber interests will suffer as saltwater moves inland.

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A ghost forest in Montana. (Getty Images)

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Flies are annoying, especially on warm weekends spent outdoors. They land on us and our food, they buzz in our ears, and some of them bite. Mosquitos are a kind of fly, and they transmit some of the world’s deadliest pathogens. But consider for a minute that you may not really know flies. Or rather, the flies you likely do know — the houseflies, the mosquitos, the gnats — are just a tiny, tiny fraction of an enormous group of insects that is, on the whole, quite wonderful. It also supports our very existence.

No, a fly didn’t write this. Flies do, however, have advocates among humans, and recently, one got to me.

Last fall, I met Emily Hartop, a scientist who studies flies, at a natural history museum in Berlin. A lifelong bug lover, Hartop told me the world is home to hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of fly species. And they fill pretty much every ecological role imaginable. Flies are superb pollinators, shrewd parasites, and exceptional janitors — they literally clean up our shit.

Flies are also anatomical marvels, Hartop said. In addition to a pair of wings, they have special balancing organs called halteres that function like gyroscopes, allowing flies to turn sharp corners, hover, and land upside down. “They’re called flies for a reason,” Hartop said. “They are amazing aerial acrobats.”

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Extreme heat can be dangerous if you’re not prepared. If you don’t live in an area that is ordinarily hot, you might not have air conditioning, so getting your home ready for a heat wave is important to avoid heat-related illness. Here are 5 things you should do to get ready if your area has a blast of hot air on the way.

Insulate your windows and doors

You might be used to wrapping your windows in plastic to keep in heat during the winter, but insulation matters in summer too. To make sure that you’re taking in as little heat from outdoors as possible, you should cover your windows with light-colored drapes, reflective film or insulation, reflective window treatments, or DIY window reflectors.

To make reflectors yourself, you can purchase (or reuse) the shiny type of cold bags that come with a food or grocery delivery. Cut them to fit your window, and hold in place with painter’s tape. If you’re in a pinch, this type of insulation, especially in the sunniest windows, can help keep the temperature down in your home.

Also, check the weatherstripping on windows and doors and replace any that has gotten damaged weatherstripping. If you have older windows, you can also try using a wintertime window insulation kit to seal your windows temporarily (though keep in mind this will bar you from opening them to create a cross breeze overnight or in the mornings, when the air is cooler).

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Photo: Ed Connor (Shutterstock)

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As an Avianca flight approached Kennedy International Airport in New York, a serving cart collision began a legal saga, prompting the question: Is artificial intelligence so smart? Credit…Nicolas Economou/NurPhoto, via Getty Images

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