James' World 2

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Taylor Wang was deeply despondent.

A day earlier, he had quite literally felt on top of the world by becoming the first Chinese-born person to fly into space. But now, orbiting Earth on board the Space Shuttle, all of his hopes and dreams, everything he had worked on for the better part of a decade as an American scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, had come crashing down around him.

Wang was the principal investigator of an experiment called the Drop Dynamics Module, which aimed to uncover the fundamental physical behavior of liquid drops in microgravity. He had largely built the experiment, and he then effectively won a lottery ticket when NASA selected him to fly on the 17th flight of the Space Shuttle program, the STS-51-B mission. Wang, along with six other crew members, launched aboard Space Shuttle Challenger in April 1985.

On the second day of the mission, Wang floated over to his experiment and sought to activate the Drop Dynamics Module. But it didn’t work. He asked the NASA flight controllers on the ground if he could take some time to try to troubleshoot the problem and maybe fix the experiment. But on any Shuttle mission, time is precious. Every crew member has a detailed timeline, with a long list of tasks during waking hours. The flight controllers were reluctant.

After initially being told no, Wang pressed a bit further. “Listen, I know my system very well,” he said. “Give me a shot.” Still, the flight controllers demurred. Wang grew desperate. So he said something that chilled the nerves of those in Houston watching over the safety of the crew and the Shuttle mission.

“Hey, if you guys don’t give me a chance to repair my instrument, I’m not going back,” Wang said.

Exactly what happened after that may never be known. But thanks to new reporting, we may finally have some answers. And though this is an old story, it still reverberates today, four decades on, with lasting consequences into the era of commercial spaceflight as more and more people fly into orbit.

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The STS-51-B mission begins with the liftoff of the Challenger from Pad 39A in April 1985.

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Albert Einstein was one smart cookie; there’s no doubt about it. But even he knew his general theory of relativity – the 21st century’s answer to Newton’s universal theory of gravity – wasn’t perfect.

Like the second-hand car you bought using your first paycheck, it does the job for day-to-day errands. Push it too hard up a steep hill or park it near a quantum strip mall, and that engine shudders to a standstill.

Peoples’ Friendship University of Russia astrophysics grad student Hamidreza Fazlollahi’s solution is to dive under the hood and see which components aren’t as essential as they seem.

By plucking out a law conserving a mathematical quality involving energy and momentum, he believes general relativity just might make it over a few more speed bumps.

Gravity describes the tendency for things with mass to come together. Whether it’s colliding galaxies, a moon struggling against inertia in its pull towards a planet, or an apple falling to Earth from the top branches of a tree, models of gravity need to explain why masses attract.

Yet such a theory also needs to operate in a Universe where objects of identical charge repel, explain why atomic nuclei stick together with incredible force, or why neutrons spontaneously decay to form protons. It also needs to work still when masses become so dense or space-time so compact, light itself can no longer escape.

And frankly, as good as it is, general relativity just isn’t up to the task.

“The problem of non-renormalizability of Einstein’s gravity is well known. It has led to dozens of attempts to treat it as a low-energy theory,” Fazlollahi says.

Renormalization is a magical sleight-of-hand used by theoretical physicists to make frustrating infinities in quantum fields disappear. When loops of reality seem to recede forever into the distance in a confusing fractal, pull a few of these techniques out of the bag, and your model is on solid ground once again

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How long does it take a recruiter to decide if you’re right for a job? It’s actually around seven seconds, according to eye-tracking research. To put that into perspective, close your eyes and take two deep breaths. That’s the time, on average, hiring managers spend skimming your resume, sizing up your history, hopes, and dreams before either tossing it into the trash or moving you to the next round of the application process.

For those of us just entering the workforce or looking to make a career transition, one thing is clear: We need to find ways to stand out — and fast. While there is a plethora of guidance on the Internet surrounding how to be a “great” candidate, it can be contradictory or confusing depending on where and when you look.

I’ve spent the past few weeks catching up with recruitment experts who specialize in remote work, as well as diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI), in attempt to decode the most up-to-date advice when it comes to applying for a new job — especially during this pandemic. I’ve asked them to weigh in on everything from how resumes are screened to how candidates can make connections that might help them land an actual interview.

Here is what I’ve learned:

Outsmart the Robots

According to Sulaiman Rahman, CEO of DiverseForce, recruiters may not be the only ones you need to impress. “Organizations are increasingly using automation to screen resumes, so it’s important for job seekers to use keywords that are also found in the actual job description,” he told me. In short, more and more artificial intelligence (AI) tools are being used to match the language in your resume to the language in the job posting.

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It’s fair to say math is not everyone’s favorite subject. In fact, for many people, the feelings of tension and anxiety that arise when trying to solve a mathematical problem can be all-consuming. This is known as math anxiety — and this feeling of being a failure at math can affect people’s self-worth for years to come.

For those who suffer from math anxiety, it can be difficult to shift from a mindset of failure to a more positive outlook when it comes to dealing with numbers. This is why, for many people, math anxiety can become a lifelong issue.

But research shows that if teachers tackle math anxiety in the classroom and encourage children to try to approach a problem in a different way — by shifting their mindset — this can be an empowering experience. This is especially the case for pupils from a disadvantaged background.

Mindset Theory

US psychology professor, Carol Dweck, came up with the idea of “mindset theory.” Dweck realized that people can often be categorized into two groups, those who believe they are bad at something and cannot change, and those who believe their abilities can grow and improve.

This formed the basis of her mindset theory, which states that some people have a “fixed mindset,” meaning they believe their ability to be set in stone and unable to be improved. Other people have a “growth mindset,” meaning they believe their ability can change and improve over time with effort and practice.

Math hack

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It’s not too late to make New Year’s resolutions. That’s because January is not over yet, but also because anything can be a temporal milestone if you want it to be. Some of the hype around such resolutions comes from what behavioral researchers call “the fresh start effect,” or the fact that people are more likely to change their behavior when a new time period begins. That juncture doesn’t necessarily have to be the start of a year, however.

Whether you want to set goals for a new year, month or week, there are evidence-backed ways to do so. Although research on New Year’s resolutions in particular is rather scarce, there is a branch of science that has been working to identify how to design goals that work for those who pursue them.

Starting in the 1960s, psychologists Edwin Locke and Gary Latham worked to develop a goal-setting theory based on scientific studies that were mostly performed in work settings. After looking at a bunch of papers, the pair realized that people with specific and challenging goals perform better. In 1990 Locke and Latham came up with five principles that successful goals should have: they should be clear; they should be challenging; they should not be too complex (and should be broken into smaller tasks if needed); people should be committed to them; and people should receive regular feedback on how they are being accomplished.

This research was initially done in a work setting, but these principles can be used for any type of goal, Latham says. Although it might be hard to get regular feedback on your New Year’s resolutions, you can still create a system to measure your progress or talk to a friend or family member to keep yourself accountable. You can also break big personal goals into simpler tasks, such as aiming to read one book per month instead of 12 in the whole year.

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With each passing year, the climate crisis comes into ever sharper focus. And no matter how small they may seem in the face of the herculean challenges we as a society face, our individual choices do matter. In that spirit, one pillar to consider is your beauty routine. More specifically, what you buy, how often you buy it, and whether it ends up in a landfill at the end of your use. This is because the beauty industry is among the world’s largest polluters. According to Euromonitor International, 152.1 billion units of beauty and personal-care packaging were sold globally in 2018 alone, much of which will never be recycled.

“I am grateful that sustainability has become a major focus for consumer products recently,” says Mia Davis, vice president of sustainability and impact at Credo Beauty. “Sustainability in beauty means that the work we do now–the resources we extract, the stuff we make–will not compromise people’s ability to do the same in the future.”

While change can be daunting, rest assured that being an environmentally conscious consumer and being passionate about your beauty routine aren’t mutually exclusive. “As someone who has always loved beauty, I didn’t want to give that up as I started to transition to a more sustainable lifestyle,” explains sustainability expert and low-waste living content creator Jhánneu. “Many people think they have to give up their lifestyles to be sustainable, but it really comes down to just finding better alternatives.” As a former self-proclaimed Sephora junkie, Ashlee Piper, an eco-lifestyle expert and author of Give a Sh*t: Do Good. Live Better. Save the Planet, knows firsthand it can–and needs–to be done.

“While I love a good haul and discovering new, niche beauty companies [to support], when it comes to creating excess that’s detrimental for the planet and our wallets, beauty and grooming items are right up there,” explains Piper, citing that as of 2018, the beauty and personal care industry has created almost 8 billion rigid plastic packaging units per year in the U.S. alone. “I began evangelizing about paring down and being more mindful about our beauty-product consumption because it’s the unsung area of personal sustainability.”

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If you’ve been stressed out and ignoring it—isn’t everyone stressed right now?— it could be time to do something about it. That’s because even though you may be basically healthy, tension is doing its stealthy damage. The latest evidence? Researchers have just linked high levels of the stress hormone cortisol to brain shrinkage and impaired memory in healthy middle-aged adults. And get this: The effect was more pronounced in women than in men.

This new research underscores an important point. Though stress affects your whole body, ground zero is your brain. It’s not just the effects of cortisol—it’s that teeth-grinders like traffic jams, personal snubs, and financial worries are perceived and interpreted by your gray matter. Fortunately, research focused on the brain is pointing to new, more effective ways to reduce your tension.

But first, let’s drill down and see how and why your brain’s natural reactions make you more vulnerable to the zings and arrows of tension.

How stress affects your brain

Aspects of the brain’s design that served us well thousands of years ago now make us susceptible to negative emotions and mental fatigue, both of which ratchet up our stress, says Amit Sood, M.D., professor of medicine at the Mayo Clinic and founder of the Mayo Clinic Resilience Program. Although our brains have evolved over time, “the speed of life today is the main stressor—it’s much faster than our brain’s ability to adapt,” he says. And that means we often end up with too little time and too few resources to address what life throws at us each day, which adds to a diminishing sense of control over our lives. Perceived lack of control has been shown to be a huge source of stress.

In his book Mindfulness Redesigned for the Twenty-First Century, Dr. Sood describes a number of traps that frequently ensnare our brains. Three of the most challenging:

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Mitch Blunt

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Once, in another life, I was a tech founder. It was the late nineties, when the Web was young, and everyone was trying to cash in on the dot-com boom. In college, two of my dorm mates and I discovered that we’d each started an Internet company in high school, and we merged them to form a single, teen-age megacorp. For around six hundred dollars a month, we rented office space in the basement of a building in town. We made Websites and software for an early dating service, an insurance-claims-processing firm, and an online store where customers could “bargain” with a cartoon avatar for overstock goods. I lived large, spending the money I made on tuition, food, and a stereo.

In 1999—our sophomore year—we hit it big. A company that wired mid-tier office buildings with high-speed Internet hired us to build a collaborative work environment for its customers: Slack, avant la lettre. It was a huge project, entrusted to a few college students through some combination of recklessness and charity. We were terrified that we’d taken on work we couldn’t handle, but also felt that we were on track to create something innovative. We blew through deadlines and budgets until the C-suite demanded a demo, which we built. Newly confident, we hired our friends, and used our corporate AmEx to expense a “business dinner” at Nobu. Unlike other kids, who were what—socializing?—I had a business card that said “Creative Director.” After midnight, in our darkened office, I nestled my Aeron chair into my IKEA desk, queued up Nine Inch Nails in Winamp, scrolled code, peeped pixels, and entered the matrix. After my client work was done, I’d write short stories for my creative-writing workshops. Often, I slept on the office futon, waking to plunder the vending machine next to the loading dock, where a homeless man lived with his cart.

I liked this entrepreneurial existence—its ambition, its scrappy, near-future velocity. I thought I might move to San Francisco and work in tech. I saw a path, an opening into life. But, as the dot-com bubble burst, our client’s business was acquired by a firm that was acquired by another firm that didn’t want what we’d made. Our invoices went unpaid. It was senior year—a fork in the road. We closed our business and moved out of the office. A few days before graduation, when I went to pay my tuition bill, a girl on the elevator struck up a conversation, then got off at her floor; on my ride down, she stepped on for a second time, and our conversation continued. We started dating, then went to graduate school in English together. We got married, I became a journalist, and we had a son. I now have a life, a world, a story. I’m me, not him—whoever he might have turned out to be.

“The thought that I might have become someone else is so bland that dwelling on it sometimes seems fatuous,” the literary scholar Andrew H. Miller writes, in “On Not Being Someone Else: Tales of Our Unled Lives” (Harvard). Still, phrased the right way, the thought has an insistent, uncanny magnetism. Miller’s book is, among other things, a compendium of expressions of wonder over what might have been. Miller quotes Clifford Geertz, who, in “The Interpretation of Cultures,” wrote that “one of the most significant facts about us may finally be that we all begin with the natural equipment to live a thousand kinds of life but end in the end having lived only one.” He cites the critic William Empson: “There is more in the child than any man has been able to keep.” We have unlived lives for all sorts of reasons: because we make choices; because society constrains us; because events force our hand; most of all, because we are singular individuals, becoming more so with time. “While growth realizes, it narrows,” Miller writes. “Plural possibilities simmer down.” This is painful, but it’s an odd kind of pain—hypothetical, paradoxical. Even as we regret who we haven’t become, we value who we are. We seem to find meaning in what’s never happened. Our self-portraits use a lot of negative space.

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Workplace flexibility ranks as the most important element to workers today, second to salary, according to global nonprofit The Conference Board. Hybrid work schedules, where individuals split time working from home and from the office, help put work in its rightful place. Such flexible working schedules allow people to prioritize personal goals like physical activity and spend more time with their family. This is significant given that Pew Research Center finds 73% of U.S. adults say family time is one of the most important things in their life.

Beyond the personal benefits, workplace flexibility is also good for workplace diversity. Women and younger generations are more likely to seek flexible work, making it an attractive offering for employers seeking to recruit a diverse workforce and improve workplace equity and well-being.

Yet, amidst the uptick in return-to-office mandates, hybrid work schedules can be an emotional and complex topic. According to Stanford research, hybrid working does not typically affect worker productivity, but some managers simply don’t feel their employees are as productive when working from home. These types of concerns, and not knowing their employer’s stance on hybrid work, can make it awkward for employees to broach the topic of pivoting to a flexible work schedule.

Consider the following scenario:

Allison, a valued part of the leadership team at a large financial organization, recently hit her 3-year tenure. She recognized the company’s broader commitment to well-being but felt like she had previously hit roadblocks when speaking up about efficiency and productivity. Allison wanted to shift to a hybrid schedule but her day-to-day work and life responsibilities left her with little time and space to prepare her best case for a more flexible work schedule. Then, one day, in a one-on-one meeting, her manager told her that she’d love to see her practice diverse thinking, using logic and evidence to challenge thought processes creatively. This got Allison thinking…

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