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The study caught my attention because I know the threat of earning less as a parent has had a chilling effect on people in my generation considering starting families. Last year, while I was reporting on motherhood dread in the US, young women told me they feared having kids would mean they’d be penalized in the workplace, affecting their financial security and opportunities. Meanwhile, the media does little to allay that concern: “One of the worst career moves a woman can make is to have children,” the New York Times once declared.

But while these economists found that Danish women who used in vitro fertilization experienced a large earnings penalty right after the birth of their first child, over the course of their careers, this penalty faded out. Eventually, the mothers even benefitted from a child premium compared to women who were not initially successful with IVF.

In other words, the so-called “motherhood penalty” that says women pay a price in the workplace for becoming moms might be less severe than previously thought.

“As children grow older and demand less care, we see that the mother’s earnings start to recover, with much of the immediate penalties made up 10 years after the birth of the first child,” the researchers wrote.

What makes this new European research so notable is that it relies on the same high-quality data that has informed previous studies on the motherhood penalty (including one Vox covered in 2018) but used an even broader sample and an approach the authors argue is better suited for long-term conclusions.

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You have to wonder how people originally figured out how to eat some foods that are beloved today. The cassava plant is toxic if not carefully processed through multiple steps. Yogurt is basically old milk that’s been around for a while and contaminated with bacteria. And who discovered that popcorn could be a toasty, tasty treat?

These kinds of food mysteries are pretty hard to solve. Archaeology depends on solid remains to figure out what happened in the past, especially for people who didn’t use any sort of writing. Unfortunately, most stuff people traditionally used made from wood, animal materials or cloth decays pretty quickly, and archaeologists like me never find it.

We have lots of evidence of hard stuff, such as pottery and stone tools, but softer things – such as leftovers from a meal – are much harder to find. Sometimes we get lucky, if softer stuff is found in very dry places that preserve it. Also, if stuff gets burned, it can last a very long time.

Corn’s ancestors

Luckily, corn – also called maize – has some hard parts, such as the kernel shell. They’re the bits at the bottom of the popcorn bowl that get caught in your teeth. And since you have to heat maize to make it edible, sometimes it got burned, and archaeologists find evidence that way. Most interesting of all, some plants, including maize, contain tiny, rock-like fragments called phytoliths that can last for thousands of years.

Scientists are pretty sure they know how old maize is. We know maize was probably first farmed by Native Americans in what is now Mexico. Early farmers there domesticated maize from a kind of grass called teosinte.

Before farming, people would gather wild teosinte and eat the seeds, which contained a lot of starch, a carbohydrate like you’d find in bread or pasta. They would pick teosinte with the largest seeds and eventually started weeding and planting it. Over time, the wild plant developed into something like what we call maize today. You can tell maize from teosinte by its larger kernels.

There’s evidence of maize farming from dry caves in Mexico as early as 9,000 years ago. From there, maize farming spread throughout North and South America.

Popped corn, preserved food

Figuring out when people started making popcorn is harder. There are several types of maize, most of which will pop if heated, but one variety, actually called “popcorn,” makes the best popcorn. Scientists have discovered phytoliths from Peru, as well as burned kernels, of this type of “poppable” maize from as early as 6,700 years ago.

You can imagine that popping maize kernels was first discovered by accident. Some maize probably fell into a cooking fire, and whoever was nearby figured out that this was a handy new way of preparing the food. Popped maize would last a long time and was easy to make.

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Is building up your co-parent in the eyes of your children part of being a good parent? This question had not occurred to me until recently. Over the past year, as my older son has become a teen, my husband has made it a habit to build me up in my children’s esteem. “Isn’t Mom the best?” he will ask them, rhetorically, when I do ordinary acts of parental service like buying someone new shoes or driving someone somewhere they need to go. “Be nice to Mom!” he will remonstrate when either child tries to give me an attitude.

You might assume that this has pleased me a great deal, but in truth, I haven’t always known what to think about it. At first, I felt ambivalent, like it was playing into a vaguely patriarchal form of mother-worship, “angel of the hearth” and all that. I also felt uncertain when my husband praised me around our sons because I knew I wasn’t returning the favor for him.

When I think about why I was hesitant to gas up my husband around my children, it’s not at all because he didn’t deserve it. It’s because I never witnessed this kind of behavior among adults when I was growing up, and it didn’t feel natural to me. My parents split up when I was young, and they were effortfully amicable, but the dramas of their own lives absorbed them, and they rarely appeared to make deliberate choices about how they communicated to me about each other. What I mostly watched them do, when I was young, was cope.

Meanwhile, I was highly skeptical of all adults. I assumed adult behavior was always in service of a selfish agenda. If either of my parents had ever praised the other to me, I would have suspected something horrible was about to happen — that one of them was on the verge of a nervous breakdown or was about to make a dreadful announcement that would seriously complicate my life. The possibility of thinking, “Dad’s right — Mom really is the best, and I should remember to treat her that way,” was nowhere near my repertoire of possible experiences.

But much to my amazement, my husband’s remarks have made a noticeable difference, and our children have started treating me with more consideration. They thank me often and ask me how my day was. They sincerely appear to see me more clearly as a person who works hard to give them a happy life. It is astonishing to me that all my husband had to do was explain this to them, and remind them to notice it, and they did. I had no idea it could work that simply.

Gassing up your co-parent in front of your children is a loaded act in this era where domestic equality is contested on a granular daily basis, to the degree that who replaces the toilet-paper roll can be a meaningful piece of evidence in a case for who is and is not showing up. If you’re trying to untangle your home life from the norms and expectations that have gagged and bound mothers for centuries, it might seem counterintuitive to make a habit out of shouting out your partner. But creating an equitable home can be counterintuitive in many ways — some of our intuition is, after all, steeped in centuries of bad compromises. I think part of me was equating spousal praise with compensation for unfair labor. But I’ve realized that praise can be as much in the service of equality as in the reinforcement of outmoded roles.

There are so many ways of developing a political consciousness in children that are little more than glorified consumer choices — Little Feminist board books, anyone? —  but teaching by example is what we all aspire to do. A political consciousness begins with noticing the gears that make community work, and I wonder if praising your co-parent is a way of revealing some of that to children, by teaching them to show gratitude for what sustains them. Could praising our co-parents actually, on a micro level, be a political act?

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Illustration: Hannah Buckman

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If you believe decades of headlines, olive oil could be the closest thing to a life-fixing panacea we have—and now it’s even helping physicists in their experiments.

Researchers at the FOM Institute for Atomic and Molecular Physics (AMOLF) used a single drop of olive oil to create a mirror effect within a system of interacting photons, and the results generate a reaction that mimics memory.

Have you ever used a computer that’s bogged down by too many open programs, and as you type or move the mouse, the screen responds a fraction of a second late? Your action has been logged, but it hasn’t yet occurred. This behavior is analogous to what the AMOLF scientists studied, which is a physical phenomenon called hysteresis, or the way the interacting items within a system are reliant on what has happened before—their memory.

To study hysteresis in photons, these researchers positioned two mirrors so that photons bounced between them, and then added a drop of oil so they could measure how photons behaved inside the drop. This oil forms a laser cavity.

“Scanning the laser-cavity frequency detuning at different speeds across an optical bistability, we find a hysteresis area that is a nonmonotonic function of the speed,” the researchers write in their paper. Photons enter the area and get muddled up in a memory system.

Photons in oil aren’t the only hysteresistic systems. Boiling water is a closely studied example of hysteresis, and scientists have studied every way to magnify the phenomenon, because it varies so much based on a bunch of different factors.

“Experimental boiling curves with hysteresis have different trends, depending on thermal and geometrical parameters of the enhancement structure and boiling liquid physical properties,” a 2015 paper explains.

Hysteresis is often linked with nucleation—the two phenomena have related definitions and frequently appear together. In a seeded raincloud, nucleation is what turns the fixed cloud vapors into drops big enough to fall as rain, and this process, too, is set in motion before it fully expresses. Nucleation acts differently and takes different amounts of time depending on temperature and other factors. The variation is on the same level as with tinkering with boiling water to fine-tune hysteresistic reactions.

There’s some heated (so to speak) debate about what really causes hysteresis. Even though parts of it have been observed for a long time, explaining what’s happening is a different question that hasn’t been fully answered. For that reason, the olive oil scientists are excited about their findings and keeping their future research within a narrow scope.

“The equations that describe how light behaves in our oil-filled cavity are similar to those describing collections of atoms, superconductors, and even high energy physics,” researcher Said Rodriguez explained. And by continuing to study only the hysteresis of the oil-filled cavity, the team can focus on those potential applications rather than the broader entire idea of hysteresis.

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A mom gives her 8-month-old baby a warm bath, towels him dry, and wriggles him into soft pajamas. As instructed, she reads him a story, lays him down in his crib, steps into the hall, and pulls the door closed. She heads downstairs, where her husband and their sleep consultant wait. The strange woman’s presence at this hour, and the fact that she was paid $2,600 to be there, might be jarring to previous generations, who learned all they knew about babies and sleep from their families.

For three days, the sleep consultant observes the family, each time for up to 12 hours. She watches how they handle meals with the baby — solids, and breastfeeding — and calmly guides the couple through nap times and a soothing bedtime routine. After her sit-ins, she makes herself available to the parents via text at all hours. Whenever her baby wakes up screaming, the mom taps a frantic message to the coach asking what to do, feeling like whatever she chooses, it will be wrong. (Trust me.)

Baby sleep, or the lack of it, has spawned a desperate market of parents who spend $325 million per year on products that claim to help infants sleep better, deeper, or longer. With that kind of money on the table, and a healthcare industry that is stretched thin, it’s no surprise a new type of wellness entrepreneur — the sleep consultant — has popped up to fill in the gap. Sleep consultants are now part of many new parents’ experiences (and expenses). But who exactly are the people we’re letting into our babies’ circadian rhythms, and what are they really qualified to be doing there?

Dr. Craig Canapari, M.D., board-certified pediatric sleep specialist and director of the Yale Pediatric Sleep Center, finished his training in 2007 and says sleep consultants weren’t on anyone’s radar then. He attributes their recent rise into the collective consciousness of parents to two things: social media, and a very real, unmet need for exhausted new parents. Sleep has always been a necessity, of course, but the isolated way we parent today, with both parents working and fewer grandparents nearby, makes it harder to come by.

“Nationwide, there just aren’t enough pediatric sleep doctors,” Canapari says. “Pediatricians do not get a lot of training in sleep medicine. I probably had one hour, in my four years of medical school, on sleep medicine. I’m not even exaggerating here. As parents who don’t have a village anymore, and we’re all working, and we have all of life’s challenges on our shoulders in addition to parenting, we need sleep.”

Sleep providers’ wait lists are long — Canapari says his new patients usually wait four to five months before being seen. For parents desperate enough to turn to a sleep psychologist for help, that’s a lifetime (and for the infant, it is their lifetime). “That’s not acceptable, right, if your life is falling apart?” he says.

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While there are plenty of things that teenagers worry about, dementia isn’t normally one of them. Yet one new major Alzheimer’s drug trial is recruiting people as young as 18 to answer what may be the most pressing question facing the field: Can the ravages of the disease be prevented by identifying those on track to get it and treating them up to 10 years before they show symptoms?

The recent arrival of drugs that slow the cognitive decline of Alzheimer’s in many people is a welcome breakthrough, but so far their efficacy has only been demonstrated in people with mild symptoms. By the time patients are diagnosed, their brains have already undergone extensive changes. But growing evidence suggests that taking the drugs well before that damage has occurred could significantly slow the disease and possibly even stop it in its tracks.

“Now we have drugs that can slow the disease by 30 percent or so in people with symptoms, but that’s not good enough,” says Reisa Sperling, a neurologist who heads the Center for Alzheimer Research and Treatment at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston. “We want to get to 100 percent, and that means preventing people from getting to the symptomatic stages.”

Earlier and earlier

In medicine, treating a disease when it is causing pathological changes in the body, but hasn’t yet progressed far enough to cause clinical symptoms, is known as secondary prevention. (Primary prevention is heading off a disease before there is any pathology, and tertiary prevention is managing symptomatic disease to slow the worsening of symptoms.) Secondary prevention has been essential to medicine’s triumphs in reducing the risks of death and disability for those with early heart disease or diabetes. Doctors don’t wait for someone to have a heart attack before prescribing a cholesterol-lowering statin or for someone to suffer artery or kidney damage before putting them on metformin to control blood sugar.

In 2023, the results of trials of lecanemab (brand name Leqembi) and donanemab on Alzheimer’s patients with mild cognitive impairment suggested that medicine may now have the tools to bring secondary prevention to bear on the disease. Both drugs are monoclonal antibodies that target the hardened clumps of protein called amyloid plaque that form in the brains of Alzheimer’s patients.

Although much is still unknown about the mechanisms of Alzheimer’s, there is little question now that the buildup of plaque precedes symptoms by many years. In the lecanemab and donanemab trials, the earlier patients were along the long road to plaque buildup, the better the drugs did in removing most of the plaque and slowing cognitive decline. “It’s when you remove nearly all the plaque with one of these drugs that you see the real benefits in terms of symptoms,” says Randall Bateman, a physician and professor of neurology at Washington University School of Medicine.

Because patients with even mild symptoms already have a large buildup of plaque, testing the notion that plaque-fighting drugs can be more effective earlier in the buildup process means enlisting presymptomatic patients for trials. “Studies are moving toward people who are just at the borderline for being positive for plaque and treating them to try to keep them from accumulating more of it and from having symptoms,” says Susan Abushakra, a physician and researcher who is vice president of clinical development and medical affairs at Alzheimer’s-focused biotech company Alzheon in Framingham, Mass.

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The center charges parents 50 percent less than market rate, and childcare workers are paid 15 percent above the going local average. Its hours of operation are flexible. It stays open from 5:30 am to 7 pm every day, longer than most child care centers, and can accommodate emergencies like unexpected work shifts. There’s only one catch: To send your child, you have to work for the San Diego Police Department.

San Diego’s law enforcement child care center, funded through both public and private money, is the first of its kind in the country, but plans for several others across the US are already underway. A bipartisan bill in Congress would expand the model further.

Supporters call law enforcement child care a win-win-win — a way to help diversify policing by making it more accessible to women, a recruiting tool at a time when police resignations and retirements are up, and applications are down. And, frankly, they hope that an innovative model for child care will give a PR boost to a profession that has taken severe blows to its reputation over the last decade.

But it also raises a basic question: Why just police? What about subsidizing other professions, including other first responders like firefighters and nurses?

“My response is those other professions haven’t been demonized like law enforcement has,” said Jim Mackay, a retired police detective and the founder of the National Law Enforcement Foundation, which has advocated for these child care centers and worked with police departments to build them. “My philosophy is if you have a healthy law enforcement, then everything else kind of prospers out from that, and we have to treat the problems with law enforcement first.”

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Marta Monteiro for Vox

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Photons are odd little beasts.

They can act like waves. They can act like particles. They are teeny tiny messengers of force. They are carriers of energy.

But most of all, they’re light. When you think of light, you’re thinking of photons. So literally, when you look around you and see, well, anything, your eyes are detecting photons that are emitted by objects like your computer screen or a lamp, photons emitted by those sources that are reflected off other objects, or an absence of photons—a result of something absorbing or blocking them as they travel through space. Because of this, nearly everything we know about objects in deep space is because of light.

Another thing photons are is weird—very, very weird.

In many ways, they behave like waves, similar to those on the beach or in your bathtub when you splash around, with crests and troughs. The distance between crests is called the wavelength, and the amplitude of a wave—its strength, effectively—is the difference in height between the trough and a crest. In a sound wave, that’s related to the volume of the sound. And in light, it’s related to the light’s intensity.

In other ways, photons act like subatomic particles, which can have momentum, spin, and more. It’s very difficult to wrap your head around the idea that light can be a wave and a particle, even at the same time, but quantum mechanics is exceptionally bizarre that way (which is a big reason it took so long to be accepted by scientists as a good model of reality). These properties, however, define light, and they in turn tell us a lot about the objects that emit or reflect it.

For light, the most fundamental property is the wavelength. That describes how much energy the light has, with shorter wavelength waves having more energy than ones with longer wavelengths. More colloquially, we see this difference in wavelength (or energy) as color. When you see something as violet, for example, you’re seeing light coming from that object with a shorter wavelength. Blue has a slightly longer wavelength, green longer again, then yellow, orange, and finally red, with the longest we see. We can measure the wavelengths of these colors of visible light to determine the range our eyes can detect, and it goes very roughly from 380 nanometers (nm) for violet to about 750 nm for red. (One nanometer is a billionth of a meter.)

An aside: the frequency of light is another fundamental property and is a measure of how frequently the crests pass an observer. It’s equal to the inverse of the wavelength; in other words, the longer the wavelength, the lower the frequency, and vice versa. Scientists use both, usually picking one or the other in their calculations, depending on what makes the math easier or more intuitive.

Our eyes have evolved cells called cones in our retinas that are sensitive to different wavelengths of light. There are three kinds: one detects a small range of wavelengths centered on red, and the others detect ranges centered on green and blue. As light hits those cells, they send signals to the brain, which combines them to create the colors we see.

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There’s an old saying (of questionable validity) that you don’t know what love is until you have a baby. It’s too often used as a way to lord one’s hard-won parenting knowledge over the uninitiated. And while it’s true that when my daughter was born, I felt like I was drowning in my love for her, the full weight of this saying revealed itself only after we got home: You don’t know what love is until you’ve had a friend leave hot dinners on your porch for weeks. You don’t know what love is until your mom drops everything to stay for a month, cooking and cleaning and caring for your new family. You don’t know what love is until a stranger in the neighborhood sees you out with a newborn wrapped up against your chest, asks your address, and leaves a huge batch of homemade soup on your front stoop. You don’t know what love is until people emerge from the woodwork and go out of their way to soften your landing into parenthood.

A month after my daughter was born, my husband had to go out of town for the first time. I was terrified. A friend of mine left her own baby at home and drove two hours to my house, bearing snacks and drinks and the easy confidence of a mom with nearly a year of experience under her belt. She walked laps around my living room, rocking my daughter as she wailed, and I looked on in awe. And then she asked if she could clean my bathroom — my disgusting, neglected bathroom, with a month of unspeakable grime caked under the toilet rim and pale pink mildew ringing the sink drain. You don’t know what love is until your friend has driven four hours round trip just to pull on rubber gloves and scrub your toilet bowl.

Ahead, here are 12 more stories from the trenches of new parenthood, on the large and small ways we take care of one another.

Care Packages For The Big Kids

My daughter, our third child, was born with a rare genetic disorder, which we didn’t know until she was about 8 days old. She was in the NICU for about six weeks. So on top of normal postpartum stuff, I had a C-section for the first time, and I had to leave her in the hospital when I was discharged. It was just a perfect storm of emotions. We were living in Texas at the time, far away from our families. It was still Covid, so we were on our own. I would wake up, spend a day at the hospital, and come home. I was barely getting through the day. I definitely felt like I was neglecting my older two children.

The week before Easter, one of my best friends in Boston sent a kit for the kids to make Easter cookies. It was pre-made sugar cookies, icing, and decorations and stuff. It was just one of those little things that I normally would have done with them that I just didn’t have the bandwidth for. A lot of times when you have a baby, so much of it is about the baby. But recognizing that there were other people affected by everything that was going on, and our whole family unit — that meant a lot. Especially for me. It was nice to have something that was so simple, but they enjoyed it so much, and it was already all set, so I could actually sit down with them and just open it up and do it.

— Claire, 36, North Carolina, mom of three, ages 8, 6, and 3

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12 parents of all ages look back on the postpartum gestures they’ll never forget.

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Electroencephalography, or EEG, was invented 100 years ago. In the years since the invention of this device to monitor brain electricity, it has had an incredible impact on how scientists study the human brain.

Since its first use, the EEG has shaped researchers’ understanding of cognition, from perception to memory. It has also been important for diagnosing and guiding treatment of multiple brain disorders, including epilepsy.

I am a cognitive neuroscientist who uses EEG to study how people remember events from their past. The EEG’s 100-year anniversary is an opportunity to reflect on this discovery’s significance in neuroscience and medicine.

On July 6, 1924, psychiatrist Hans Berger performed the first EEG recording on a human, a 17-year-old boy undergoing neurosurgery. At the time, Berger and other researchers were performing electrical recordings on the brains of animals.

What set Berger apart was his obsession with finding the physical basis of what he called psychic energy, or mental effort, in people. Through a series of experiments spanning his early career, Berger measured brain volume and temperature to study changes in mental processes such as intellectual work, attention, and desire.

He then turned to recording electrical activity. Though he recorded the first traces of EEG in the human brain in 1924, he did not publish the results until 1929. Those five intervening years were a tortuous phase of self-doubt about the source of the EEG signal in the brain and refining the experimental setup. Berger recorded hundreds of EEGs on multiple subjects, including his own children, with both experimental successes and setbacks.

Finally convinced of his results, he published a series of papers in the journal Archiv für Psychiatrie and had hopes of winning a Nobel Prize. Unfortunately, the research community doubted his results, and years passed before anyone else started using EEG in their own research.

Berger was eventually nominated for a Nobel Prize in 1940. But Nobels were not awarded that year in any category due to World War II and Germany’s occupation of Norway.

When many neurons are active at the same time, they produce an electrical signal strong enough to spread instantaneously through the conductive tissue of the brain, skull and scalp. EEG electrodes placed on the head can record these electrical signals.

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