James' World 2

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In addition to its magnitude, which will be dangerous for some, the heat will be notable for its longevity. Phoenix, for example, on Monday logged its 11th day in a row at or above 110 degrees, and the forecast calls for highs in the 111-to-117-degree range until further notice. That could catapult the heat-prone city into its longest-ever streak above that level.

The heat will be dry yet punishing in the Southeast, while the south-central U.S. and southern Plains will contend with humidity drawn in from the Gulf of Mexico. That will overlap with the hot temperatures to push heat indexes — measures of how hot it feels, taking into account temperature and humidity — into hazardous territory.

What’s happening right now?

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Jessie Fuentes walks along the Rio Grande under a warm sun on Thursday, July 6, 2023. Heat records are expected into the week ahead. (Eric Gay/AP)

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From left, Joseph Neubauer, Justice Clarence Thomas, Paul Anthony Novelly, and David Sokol at the Horatio Alger awards in 2010, where the justice was honored.

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President Biden said that Ukraine would have to meet other qualifications, “including democratization.” Credit…Doug Mills/The New York Times

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A rendering by a private developer called ASTM of what a new stone facade of Penn Station would look like from 33rd Street and Eighth Avenue, with the drum of Madison Square Garden also clad in light stone. Credit…via ASTM, PAU, and HOK

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Gothamist reported that “residents of the Bug Apple want these unwelcome tourists to skip town.”

WABC amplified the city’s pain: “No, you are not ‘bugging-out.’ A swarm of insects has seemingly taken over the city.”

But for every offhand, on-the-street reference to a Biblical-style plague, be it a swarm of locusts or gnats or hail and thunder, there is a scientist. Dr. Corrie Moreau, a Cornell University professor in entomology, who looked at images of the insects, which can be green or white, said she believed they were aphids. Insect swarms often emerge to coordinate reproduction, which she believed could be attributed to the current appearance in New York City.

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A close-up of a green aphid on a leaf. Credit…nechaevkon/Shutterstock

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For as long as humans have roamed the Earth, we have sought to find our place in the cosmos. From the city-states of ancient Greece to the soaring capstones of the Egyptian pyramids, across the deserts and towering mountains of ancient China down to the rolling plains of Mesoamerica, humans have sought to understand how the universe works. They developed mathematics to trace the motions of the planets, estimated the circumference of the Earth by walking from city to city, created star tables and timekeeping codices, and even recorded celestial events like Halley’s Comet, supernovae, and eclipses. 

With time, we have refined our models of the Universe. Using ellipses, Johannes Kepler reconfigured celestial motions. Galileo revolutionized Copernicus’ heliocentric model of the Solar System by discovering that the Sun, not the Earth, is the body around which all other elements of the Solar System orbit. Isaac Newton developed the theory of gravity, which was later supplanted by Albert Einstein’s theory of general relativity.

Discovery by discovery, we paint in the gaps of the picture of our Universe; and yet somehow, with each brushstroke, that image morphs, evolving into something ever-changing, new, and unrecognizable. The Universe that Kepler and Galileo, Copernicus and Kepler, Newton, and Galileo, and even Einstein understood is different from the one we know today.

Today’s understanding of the Universe is unsettling. It is not one that fits in a tidy little box with neat lines and a perfect lid. Our Universe is mystifying, complex. It defies expectations. 

For starters, our Universe is not a static, enclosed entity. Our Universe is expanding. From everywhere all at once, the fabric of spacetime is stretching away from everywhere else like an inflating balloon, carrying galaxies along with it. Photons traveling the lanes of the cosmos are stretched along with spacetime, their wavelengths growing ever longer, or redder, thus red-shifting with the expansion of space. 

Our Universe isn’t expanding into anything. To our knowledge, there is no extra dimension around the Universe; rather, space itself is expanding, causing the space between galaxy clusters — the largest gravitationally bound objects in the Universe — to get bigger and bigger with time.

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Credit: ESA/Hubble

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Most creatures sleep, but until now, REM (rapid eye movement) sleep, the phase of sleep in which dreams occur, was thought to be exclusive to vertebrates. Octopuses appear to be the first invertebrates to show they are also capable of this

When it comes to neural function, studies have found these cephalopods are more like us than we think (pun somewhat intended). Having no spine hasn’t stopped them from evolving a complex nervous system. A 2022 study found that parts of their brains, the frontal and vertical lobes, work much like the hippocampus and limbic lobe in humans and other vertebrates. The hippocampus is critical to learning and memory, while the limbic lobe controls complex emotional reactions, such as the fight-or-flight response that is triggered by stress or fear.

Now it seems that octopuses have even more in common with us. In studying their sleep behavior, a team of researchers at the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology observed both periods of quiet sleep, or NREM sleep (also known as slow wave sleep), and bursts of neural activity, during which the animals’ eyes and tentacles twitched while their skin changed color. Neural activities like these, which are similar to the waking state, only happen during REM sleep. Because they can transition between NREM and REM sleep, octopuses are the only known invertebrates that have two phases of sleep.

“If the functions ascribed to two-stage sleep are truly general, then one may expect to find neural and behavioral correlates of two-stage sleep widely among animals showing complex cognitive abilities,” the research team, led by neuroethologist Sam Reiter of the University of Okinawa, wrote in a recent study.

You awake?

To pursue this study, Reiter’s team needed to check that the octopuses were, in fact, asleep. They waited until the animals appeared asleep. When their eight-legged subjects were lying flat on the bottoms of the tanks, the team stimulated them to see if there would be a delayed reaction. The octopuses’ reaction to this stimulation was much slower than when they were awake. When the team was positive that the animals were asleep, they began observations.

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Imagen Rafael Cosme Daza

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It’s not just kids, of course. My colleague has just come down with covid-19. The onset of symptoms was rapid, and she described it as “like being hit by a freight train.” “How very retro of you,” another colleague commented. Another replied: “This is still a thing?”

As a health reporter who has been covering covid since the early days, I am still asked this question on a fairly regular basis. So this week let’s take a look at exactly where we stand with covid.

It’s worth pointing out that there are still some big, unanswered questions when it comes to covid-19. For a start, we still don’t really know where this particular coronavirus came from. Most scientists believe it must have jumped from an animal host to humans at a market in Wuhan, China. But some maintain that it could have leaked from a lab. My colleague Antonio Regalado has explored the question in his five-part podcast series, Curious Coincidence.

What we do know is that covid-19 spread all around the world in 2020. On January 9 of that year, Chinese authorities determined that a mysterious cluster of pneumonia-like illnesses was caused by a novel coronavirus. The first death was reported days later. Since then, almost 7 million more deaths have been confirmed. The true figure is thought to be higher.

Lockdowns and the use of face masks helped slow the spread of the disease. But even “zero-covid” policies that aimed to keep the virus out of entire countries couldn’t stem the spread. To date, there have been over 767 million confirmed cases.

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But I believe there’s a bug — a set of cognitive biases — in people’s brains that causes them to perceive a fall from grace even when it hasn’t happened. I and my colleague Daniel Gilbert at Harvard have found evidence for that bug, which we recently published in the journal Nature. While previous researchers have theorized about why people might believe things have gotten worse, we are the first to investigate this belief all over the world, to test its veracity, and to explain where it comes from.

We first collected 235 surveys with over 574,000 responses total and found that, overwhelmingly, people believe that humans are less kind, honest, ethical, and moral today than they were in the past. People have believed in this moral decline at least since pollsters started asking about it in 1949, they believe it in every single country that has ever been surveyed (59 and counting), they believe that it’s been happening their whole lives and they believe it’s still happening today. Respondents of all sorts — young and old, liberal and conservative, white and Black — consistently agreed: The golden age of human kindness is long gone.

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Anastasiia Sapon for The New York Times

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They found that subjects who’d ridden the bikes had markedly better scores on tests of their prefrontal cortex function than those who’d spent the hour watching an episode of 24 instead. The prefrontal cortex is the part of the brain that handles reasoning, problem-solving, learning, memory, communication skills, and other tasks that are essential for most business leaders. By testing over time, the researchers found that this improved function lasted at least half an hour, and up to two hours. 

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