The Caribbean’s sandy beaches, clear turquoise water and vibrant coral reefs filled with an amazing variety of sea creatures have long been the pride of the islands.
The big three – sun, sea and sand – have made this tropical paradise the most tourism-reliant region in the world.
But now, all of that is under threat. The explosive growth of a type of seaweed called sargassum is wreaking havoc on economies, coastal environments and human health across the islands.
I study the intersection of critical infrastructure and disasters, particularly in the Caribbean. The sargassum invasion has worsened since it exploded in the region in 2011. Forecasts and the seaweed already washing up suggest that 2024 will be another alarming year.
The Sargasso Sea
The Sargasso Sea is often referred to as a golden, floating rainforest for its vast floating sargassum blooms and the wide variety of sea life that it supports.
It is the only sea in the world with no land borders. Instead, it is bounded by four Atlantic Ocean currents: the North Atlantic current, the Gulf Stream, the North Atlantic Equatorial Current and the Canary Current.
Without human interference, and under normal conditions, sargassum is a good thing. It has existed in the Caribbean for centuries, providing habitat and food for ocean wildlife, including threatened and endangered species such as the porbeagle shark and the anguillid eel.
Conditions over the past decade around the Caribbean Sea, North Atlantic and Gulf of Mexico, however, have been anything but normal.
Since 2011, vast mats of sargassum seaweed have been washing up on Caribbean islands. On shore, they pile up into a dead and stinky mass.
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Sargassum washes ashore in large, smelly mats. Clearing it away isn’t easy. Lhote/Andia/Universal Images Group via Getty Images
Kevin Hainline can time travel from his desk. Well, he can’t physically launch himself back in time. But as a user of NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), the University of Arizona astronomer regularly observes galaxies from billions of years ago—because it takes that long for their emitted light to reach us from across the cosmos. And recently, he tracked one further back into the universe’s history than ever before.
The record-breaking galaxy, named JADES-GS-z14-0, appears to us as it existed 290 million years after the big bang, when the universe was a mere 2 percent of its present 13.8-billion-year age. This places it well within a mysterious epoch called the cosmic dawn—when the universe’s first stars began to shine and galaxies coalesced. The former record holder, a galaxy named JADES-GS-z13-0 that was reported in 2022 by Hainline and his colleagues on the JWST Advanced Deep Extragalactic Survey (JADES) research team, was observed about 325 million years following the big bang. Hainline acknowledges this age difference may seem unremarkable; cosmically speaking, not a lot usually happens in just 35 million years. But JADES-GS-z14-0 has properties that are vastly different from its slightly older counterpart, making it an anomaly that has experts second-guessing how the universe’s first galaxies evolved. “I was skeptical that it was anything special for a number of reasons,” Hainline recalls of his initial glimpse of the galaxy. “It just seemed too big and too bright…. But in January of this year, when we confirmed that it is, in fact, the new record holder, I just laughed. I had to get up from my office chair and walk down the hallway and look at the faces of the other JADES scientists.”
The group’s initial doubts were well-founded, says Brant Robertson, an astronomer and JADES member at the University of California, Santa Cruz, who is also a co-author of the preprint paper that reported the new record holder. JWST has been unveiling candidate early galaxies that seem to shatter experts’ expectations since it began operating in early 2022, but some of them were ultimately proved to be impostors—more modern galaxies much closer to us in the universe than JWST’s first glance would suggest. Unsurprisingly, Robertson says, the farthest galaxies are the hardest to accurately observe and verify; their qualities can be the most fascinating yet deserve the most skepticism.
JADES-GS-z14-0 was no exception to this rule; at first, Hainline thought it was just one half of another galaxy. With closer examination, he found that to be illusory. The other galaxy was a “foreground” object—an entirely different system billions of light-years closer to us that just happened to overlap with JADES-GS-z14-0 in our line of sight. With that relationship untangled, the candidate’s bizarre qualities became clearer: if it was an early galaxy, JADES-GS-z14-0 was abnormally large and unusually shaped. “At that point, I had been looking at thousands of little smudgy galaxies,” Hainline says. “But then this one came along, and I sent it first to my colleague Jake Helton [of the University of Arizona] and said, ‘This is seriously weird.’ And after looking into it more for some time, I knew we had to get a spectrum on it.”
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Artist’s illustration of NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope. James Vaughan/Science Photo Library/Alamy Stock Photo
Arriving early to pick up my daughter Nina at the elementary school, I pulled my car into a parking spot across the street and scanned the playground for her. Most of the boys charged across the playground in a hilarious Mad Max version of soccer. A handful of girls played four-square with a red playground ball. And the rest either dangled from the jungle gym or crouched underneath it in small clumps.
I spotted Nina sitting on one of the benches, back hunched, head down. One of the four-square players lobbed a sneering taunt in her direction. The other three players followed up with more. Nina didn’t move, so the player with the ball threw it at her. Nina lifted her face, grimaced — in pain or anger, I couldn’t tell — and shouted something back at the other girls.
The playground monitor materialized — where was she before? — and put her hands on her hips while she spoke to Nina. The other girls didn’t even try to cover their smirks. Then the bell rang, and the children lined up to go back inside. It was a miracle I didn’t wreck the car when Nina told me on the way home that the teacher had made her stand in front of the class and apologize for being disruptive at recess and for not respecting her classmates.
That day, my overwhelming desire was to take her back into my body, to hold her there where no one could reach her without first going through me. I wish I could say I swooped in and saved Nina from her tormentors, but I would have to accept failure — and acknowledge my own powerlessness — in order to do that.
The bullying began in earnest in second grade. The town was small, the school even smaller. Most of the children in Nina’s class had played at our house and ridden in our car and eaten the snacks we always brought to various events.
They were nice kids, we thought, but something changed over the summer between first and second grade. Each day our formerly lively daughter came home to us quiet, pale, and withdrawn. For a while, Nina asked me why the girls were so mean to her, but my answer, my assurance that we loved her, was useless, because the real answer was that I didn’t know — I didn’t know! Nina’s first grade teacher had been at a loss as well, when I’d asked her the same question.
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Nina at home on the morning of her first day of Kindergarten in 1997. Courtesy of Lea Page
The Moon has been a source of wonder and mystery for centuries. Even with numerous missions and extensive research, many of its secrets remain hidden beneath its surface. Recent discoveries by China’s Chang’e-4 mission have shed light on previously hidden structures on the far side of the Moon, revealing billions of years of geological history and providing new insights into its formation and evolution.
Launched in 2018, the Chang’e-4 lander by the Chinese National Space Administration (CNSA) became the first spacecraft to land on the far side of the Moon. This historic mission has been capturing stunning images of impact craters and collecting mineral samples, offering unprecedented insights into the Moon’s subsurface structures. In 2019, the Yutu-2 rover, part of the Chang’e-4 mission, began using Lunar Penetrating Radar (LPR) to map the upper 1,000 feet (300 meters) of the lunar surface in finer detail than ever before.
Findings on the Far Side of the Moon
The findings from the Chang’e-4 mission, recently published in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Planets, reveal the top 130 feet (40 meters) of the far side of the Moon’s surface consist of multiple layers of dust, soil, and broken rocks. Hidden within these layers is a crater formed by a large impact event.
Lead study author Jianqing Feng explained that the rubble surrounding this formation is likely ejecta from the impact. Beneath these surface layers, scientists discovered five distinct layers of lunar lava that spread across the landscape billions of years ago. These findings suggest a dynamic volcanic history, with the Moon’s mantle containing pockets of molten magma that erupted through surface cracks created by space debris impacts.
It took a global pandemic to convince American businesses that their employees could work productively from home, or a favorite coffee shop. Post-COVID-19, employers are struggling to find the right balance of in-office and remote work. However, hybrid work is likely here to stay, at least for a segment of workers.
This shift isn’t just changing lifestyles – it’s also affecting commercial spaces. Office vacancy rates post-COVID-19 shot up almost overnight, and they remain near 20% nationwide, the highest rate since 1979 as tenants downsize in place or relocate. This workspace surplus is putting pressure on existing development loans and leading to defaults or creative refinancing in a market already plagued by higher interest rates.
Office tenants with deeper pockets have gravitated to newer and larger buildings with more amenities, often referred to as Class A or “trophy” buildings. Older Class B and C buildings, which often have fewer amenities or less-desirable locations, have struggled to fill space.
High vacancy rates are forcing developers to get creative. With reduced demand for older buildings, along with housing shortages in many American cities, some downtown buildings are being converted to residential use.
These projects often include some percentage of affordable housing, underwritten by tax incentives. In October 2023, the Biden administration released a list of federal loan, grant, tax credit, and technical assistance programs that can support commercial-to-residential conversions.
As an architect, I’m encouraged to see these renovations of older commercial buildings, which are more economical and sustainable than new construction. In my view, they are fundamentally changing the character of our cities for the better. Even though only about 20% to 30% of older buildings can be profitably converted, architects and developers are quickly learning how to grade these structures to identify good candidates.
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Rooftop construction at a high-rise building undergoing conversion to apartments in Manhattan’s financial district in New York City, April 11, 2023. AP Photo/Bebeto Matthews
It’s well-established that spending too much time sitting (ahem, working at a desk) could have an impact on our bodies. Sitting all day can decrease muscle strength and is linked to bad health outcomes like heart disease.
But is all sitting created equal?
Some folks say sitting on the ground is actually good for your health, and should be done regularly ― a concept that almost seems too good to be true.
Below, experts shared with HuffPost the pros and cons of sitting on the floor — and why no one posture is ideal.
Sitting cross-legged on the ground can be good for mobility and flexibility.
Most adults likely don’t often find themselves frequently sitting on the floor in the cross-legged position. But kids who regularly sit and play on the floor may be onto something.
“I really think from a health benefits or a musculoskeletal condition standpoint, that [cross-legged sitting] posture really does help us with … hip, low back, and knee range of motion,” said Dr. Christopher Bise, an assistant professor in the department of physical therapy at the University of Pittsburgh. It also helps keep our lower body flexible, he said.
Dr. Jennifer O’Connell, a physiatrist at the Hospital for Special Surgery in New York, added that “one of the problems with sitting in a chair is that it’s a position where your hamstrings tend to be tight — sitting in a cross legged position may help that somewhat.”
But if you aren’t able to get yourself down to the floor, you can still work on your mobility and flexibility.
“Remember that these positions don’t necessarily have to be on the floor. You can, on a couch, get in to the cross-legged sitting position, or you can use different sitting positions on the couch that will also increase your range of motion, as well,” Bise explained.
Having a good range of motion is important as you age.
Maintaining your range of motion is important for many reasons — you’ll be better able to get around your house, do your errands, and play with children and grandchildren as your years increase.
“But I think one of the things that happens when we get older is … we become less flexible because we begin to slow down ― but we don’t have to be less flexible,” Bise said.
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When it comes to mobility and flexibility, sitting on the ground from time to time actually has health benefits.
But there’s one holiday you may know little about — even though, for many, it is the most important of the year.
Read on to learn about the history, present, and future of Juneteenth, the oldest celebration of the end of slavery in the United States.
Juneteenth Honors a Significant Moment in History
Many people think of Emancipation Day (the end of American slavery) as Jan. 1, 1863, the day President Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, declaring “all persons held as slaves … shall be then, thenceforward and forever free.”
But it wasn’t until June 19, 1865–2.5 years later — that news of the proclamation finally reached the quarter-million slaves living in Texas. That’s when Union General Gordon Granger arrived in Galveston to make the announcement, reading, “The people of Texas are informed … all slaves are free. This involves an absolute equality of personal rights and rights of property between former masters and slaves…”
The name “Juneteenth” marks this historic day literally, as a combination of “June” and “19th.”
In Texas, a Long Delay Keeps Slavery Alive
Why was there such a long delay to abolish slavery in Texas?
Many white landowners in Texas, as elsewhere, resisted granting enslaved Africans their freedom, and because there weren’t many Union troops in the state to enforce the new order, they were able to keep Black people enslaved for long after they were officially declared free. (It’s also worth noting that the proclamation only applied to enslaved people in the confederacy and not to Union-loyal states like Delaware, Kentucky, Maryland and Mississippi.)
Even after Granger arrived, some Texas slaves remained in bondage for several more years.
Other Stories Emerge to Explain the Delay
Many folkloric stories have been shared over the years to explain the delay in Texas. As one story goes, it took more than two years for a messenger traveling by mule to make his way from Washington to Texas. In another tale, this messenger was murdered on his way to delivering the news.
If it seems like things are kind of off these days, you’re not alone. Recently, more than 100,000 people liked a post marking the start of the pandemic that said, “[Four] years ago, this week was the last normal week of our lives.”
Objectively speaking, we are living through a dumpster fire of a historical moment. Right now more than one million people are displaced and at risk of starvation in Gaza, as are millions more in Sudan. Wars are on the rise around the globe, and 2023 saw the most civilian casualties in almost 15 years.
H5N1 bird flu has jumped to cows, several farm workers have been infected, and scientists are warning about another potential pandemic. According to data from wastewater, the second biggest COVID surge occurred this winter. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates at least 24,000 people have died of COVID so far in 2024.
Last year was the hottest ever and recorded the highest number of billion-dollar weather and climate disasters. Not to mention that over the past few years, mass shootings have significantly increased, we’ve seen unparalleled attacks on democracy and science, and mental health issues have skyrocketed.
Truth be told, things were bananas even before the pandemic: just think of the Great Recession, the 2009 swine flu pandemic, and Brexit. Academics use terms like “polycrisis” and “postnormal times” to describe the breadth and scale of the issues we now face.
Welcome to the new normal, an age where many things that we used to deem unusual or unacceptable have become just what we live with. Concerningly, though, “living with it” means tolerating greater suffering and instability than we used to, often without fully noticing or talking about it. When authorities tell us to “resume normal activities” after an on-campus shooting or give guidance on how to increase our heat tolerance in an ever-hotter world, we may sense that something is awry even as we go along with it.
It didn’t take long for me to recognize the low bar awaiting me as a new father. In the early, bleary days of parenthood, I was congratulated for relaying the vaguest details of my son’s whereabouts and received pats on the back for explaining the origin of his name. New moms were rarely granted the same level of enthusiasm; they couldn’t delight a crowd by remarking on whatever precociously cool song their kid smiled along to. Meanwhile, I had only the faintest grasp of my son’s diaper size. I remember the approving nods I received from strangers when I folded his stroller or produced a clean pacifier from my pocket. As he grew into a state that one is contractually obliged to call “cherubic,” people would offer their seats and a sympathetic smile when we boarded the bus, my son wielding a remote control, for some reason.
It’s nice when random people smile at you, yet few of these interactions felt truly meaningful. They merely confirmed a basic competency, an ability to not completely flub my lines. How we behave, at home or in public, is a product of our innate impulses and feelings in concert with the expectations of our surroundings. For the modern-day American father, prescribed identities can be contradictory. On one hand, there’s probably never been an age that so values a kind of chill sensitivity among fathers; witness the dawn of the #girldad, the think pieces about new frontiers in hands-on fatherhood, the mainstream rejection of the withholding, stoic paterfamilias archetype. And, yet, I’ve never been bombarded with so much frothy anxiety around masculinity and testosterone. In an age of declining global birthrates, it is, in the eyes of figures such as Elon Musk, about fathering, rather than fatherhood.
Perhaps it’s safest to keep expectations low. For a while, Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, a professor emerita of anthropology at the University of California, Davis, hewed to the belief that males were simply wired differently; one of her initial forays into academic research explored the penchant for infanticide among male langur monkeys. She spent much of her career studying the behaviors of primates, particularly the reproductive and resilient survival strategies of females. In 1981, she published “The Woman That Never Evolved,” which argued that traditional views on evolutionary biology hadn’t accounted for the ways in which female primates had developed instincts for competition, independence, and sexual assertiveness. In 1999, she published “Mother Nature,” a history of mothers and infants, in which she explored the idea of the “allomother,” a term she popularized to refer to anyone other than the birth mother who helps to care for an infant.
“Father Time,” Hrdy’s latest book, picks up where “Mother Nature” and “Mothers and Others,” published in 2009, left off. Her interest lies in how external forces shape what’s happening inside our bodies, and vice versa. She contends that the emergence of more egalitarian norms of parenthood aren’t just changing society; they could change the biochemical makeup of men, too.
Hrdy writes of the researchers Katherine Wynne-Edwards and Anne Story, whose “shared interest in what renders males caring” spanned species. Wynne-Edwards had studied the mating habits of Campbell’s dwarf hamsters, found in China, Russia, and Central Asia. Male hamsters don’t just stick around pregnant females—already a rarity—they are integral parts of the birthing process, nuzzling with their partners and “oh so delicately” assisting with delivery. Wynne-Edwards found that levels of prolactin, a hormone that’s responsible for lactation and that affects a mammal’s immune system and metabolism, rose in the male hamster as his mate’s pregnancy progressed.
Film and Writing Festival for Comedy. Showcasing best of comedy short films at the FEEDBACK Film Festival. Plus, showcasing best of comedy novels, short stories, poems, screenplays (TV, short, feature) at the festival performed by professional actors.
Sargassum washes ashore in large, smelly mats. Clearing it away isn’t easy. Lhote/Andia/Universal Images Group via Getty Images
Rooftop construction at a high-rise building undergoing conversion to apartments in Manhattan’s financial district in New York City, April 11, 2023. 
Chris Clor/Getty Images
James' World 2 