James' World 2

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To transform reality into the mental landscape that occupies out minds, our brain performs a multitude of operations. Some are short-cuts; assumptions that become obvious the moment we attempt to make sense of the conflict presented in an optical illusion.

For individuals with autism, those shortcuts and mental operations could work a little differently, subtly influencing how the brain constructs a picture of everyday life.

With this in mind, scientists have turned to optical illusions to better understand neurodivergence.

A study on the brain activity of 60 children, including 29 diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder ( ASD), suggests differences in the way individuals process illusory shapes could reveal ways autism affects specific processing pathways in the brain.

The research made use of a classic style of illusion popularized by the Italian psychologist, Gaetano Kanizsa, which typically involves simple lines or shapes, such as circles, with sections removed. Arranged in a certain way, the empty spaces align to describe a second shape in their negative space.

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The way our brains perceive shapes could tell us a thing or two about autism. (Evgeny Gromov/Getty Images)

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In many ways, it’s easier to make friends when you’re a child, as kids meet in the classroom, on the playground, or through a recreational sports team—the opportunities seem endless. 

Fast-forward to adulthood, when forging platonic relationships becomes trickier than finding a like-minded pal to play tag with at recess. Sure, there might be your post-grad roommates or close colleagues, but at some point, maintaining friendships takes a backseat. 

Many middle-aged adults are essentially swimming against the tide trying to keep up with caregiving and job responsibilities and find one day that they haven’t prioritized new friendships or nourished old ones. 

“As we approach middle age, we have found ourselves busy,” says Dr. Marc Schulz, coauthor of The Good Life and associate director of the Harvard Study of Adult Development. “Some people wake up and realize that they really need to rebuild their friendship connections…a lot of their social connections may revolve just around work, or just around other sorts of activities that their kids do.” 

Older adults may also grieve the loss of past friendships, making them fearful and closed off to new opportunities, says Dr. Nina Vasan, a psychiatrist and the chief medical officer at Real, a mental health support app. 

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If you were to travel back to when dinosaurs walked the Earth, it might take you a little while before realizing that you had slipped into another time. A wandering Tyrannosaurus or a shovel-beaked Edmontosuarus chewing a rotting log would be immediate giveaways, of course, but the forests, floodplains and other landscapes of the time would not be so alien as to immediately arouse your suspicion. We still inhabit the same planet as our favorite saurians, after all, and the world of the dinosaurs was not quite like what we often see in the movies.

The trick almost every dinosaur movie tries to perform is how to bring us in contact with the terrible lizards. Sometimes the creatures live on a lost world—a plateau or island where the Age of Reptiles never ended. Jurassic Park popularized another method: genetic reinvention, returning dinosaurs to the world they supposedly ruled. Time travel is another favorite, either bringing the scaly stars to the present or throwing humans back into the past. The latest prehistoric romp, 65, in theaters this weekend, attempts something a little different, with future humans seeming to drift through both space and time to crash land on Earth just before the Cretaceous come to a fiery close.

First thing’s first—the title 65 is a dino-sized mistake. In 2012 the International Commission for Stratigraphy, or geologists who determine Earth’s timescales, revised the end of the Cretaceous Period to be about 66 million years ago rather than the previous estimate of 65.5. If you were to visit Earth about 65 million years ago, during a time called the Paleocene, you would find thick forests where the descendants of mammals that survived the asteroid impact were starting to get big. Triceratops would have been extinct for a million years.

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Adam Driver stars in the new movie 65. Sony Pictures

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What lies beyond the edges of the observable universe? Is it possible that our universe is just one of many in a much larger multiverse?

Movies can’t get enough of exploring these questions. From Oscar winners like Everything Everywhere All at Once to superhero blockbusters like Dr. Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, science fiction stories are full of creative interactions between alternate realities. And depending on which cosmologist you ask, the concept of a multiverse is more than pure fantasy or a handy storytelling device.

Humanity’s ideas about alternate realities are ancient and varied—in 1848 Edgar Allan Poe even wrote a prose poem in which he fancied the existence of “a limitless succession of Universes.” But the multiverse concept really took off when modern scientific theories attempting to explain the properties of our universe predicted the existence of other universes where events take place outside our reality.

“Our understanding of reality is not complete, by far,” says Stanford University physicist Andrei Linde. “Reality exists independently of us.”

If they exist, those universes are separated from ours, unreachable and undetectable by any direct measurement (at least so far). And that makes some experts question whether the search for a multiverse can ever be truly scientific.

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In classical physics, a vacuum is a total void—a true manifestation of nothingness. But quantum physics says that empty space isn’t really empty. Instead, it’s buzzing with “virtual” particles blipping in and out of existence too quickly to be detected. Scientists know that these virtual particles are there because they measurably tweak the qualities of regular particles.

One key property these effervescent particles change is the minuscule magnetic field generated by a single electron, known as its magnetic moment. In theory, if scientists could account for all the types of virtual particles that exist, they could run the math and figure out exactly how skewed the electron’s magnetic moment should be from swimming in this virtual particle pool. With precise enough instruments, they could check their work against reality. Determining this value as accurately as possible would help physicists nail down exactly which virtual particles are toying with the electron’s magnetic moment—some of which might belong to a veiled sector of our universe, where, for example, the ever-elusive dark matter resides.

In February, four researchers at Northwestern University announced they had done just that. Their results, published in Physical Review Letters, report the electron magnetic moment with staggering precision: 14 digits past the decimal point, and more than twice as exact as the previous measurement in 2008. 

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Photograph: Getty Images

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Mucus is not widely considered a topic for polite conversation. It’s something to be discreetly blown into a tissue, folded up, and thrown away.

But the simple truth is that without mucus, you wouldn’t be alive.

“Mucus is essential for the protection of your body,” says Jeffrey Spiegel, an ear, nose, and throat surgeon at Boston University. “It’s a protective barrier and it allows you to breathe comfortably. If you had no mucus, you’d be quite sorry you didn’t.”

Given how important mucus is — and how often colds and allergies cause mucus-related symptoms — it’s worth learning a bit more about it.

1) You produce about 1.5 quarts of mucus a day — and swallow the vast majority

Most of us think of mucus as something that leaks from our nose, but the truth is that it also gets secreted in your trachea and other tubes that carry air through your lungs, where it’s technically called phlegm. Wherever it’s produced, mucus is a mix of water and proteins, and most of it gets pushed to the back of your throat by microscopic hairs called cilia.

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Centuries before the birth of Leonardo Da Vinci, three brothers from Baghdad gathered their designs for more than 100 ahead-of-their-time inventions into a manuscript titled the Book of Ingenious Devices. Also known as the Kitáb al-Hiyal, it contains blueprints for rudimentary gas masks and mechanical digging machines — devices that would not become commonplace for another thousand years.

The brothers — Muhamad, Ahmad, and al-Hasan bin Musa ibn Shakir, who were called the Banu Musa or the “Sons of Moses,” after their father — grew up in the early 9th century AD. It was the dawn of the Islamic Golden Age, an age which they themselves helped bring about. Each brother specialized in a different area of study: Muhamad in astronomy, Ahmad in engineering, and al-Hasan in geometry.

Legend has it that the Banu Musa, left impoverished after their father passed away, were taken under the wing of Abu al-Abbas Abdallah ibn Harun al-Rashid, a caliph remembered for his interest in and support for the development of the arts and sciences. It was on his orders that the brothers set to work on their Book of Ingenious Devices, which they completed around 850 AD.

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Credit: WH_Pics / Adobe Stock

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The Devils River, in southwestern Texas, runs, mirage-like, along the edge of the Chihuahuan Desert, through some of the most barren countryside in the United States. Access to the river is limited; unless you’re in a kayak, the only way to travel upstream is along a skein of rutted dirt roads. It was on one of these roads that, a few years ago, David Wagner noticed a shrub that seemed to him peculiarly filled with promise.

Wagner is an entomologist who teaches at the University of Connecticut. He has close-cropped silvery hair and a square jaw and bears a passing resemblance to George C. Scott playing General Buck Turgidson. The way other people might recall a marvelous restaurant or a heartbreaking vista, Wagner remembers a propitious plant. He has friends who own a house along the Devils River and each time he has visited them he has stopped by the exact same shrub to investigate. No luck. This past October, I was traveling with him when he tried yet again. He spread a white nylon sheet on the ground, then started whacking the bush with a pole to dislodge anything that might be clinging to it.

“Un-fucking-believable!” he exclaimed. I was whacking a plant nearby, just for the hell of it. Wagner held out his hand. A caterpillar about three-quarters of an inch long was wriggling across his palm. It looked brownish and totally ordinary until I examined it under a loupe, at which point it was revealed to be flamboyantly striped, with yellow and red splotches and two black, hornlike protuberances sticking out of its back. Based on a series of taxonomic calculations, Wagner was convinced that the caterpillar was the juvenile form of an exceptionally rare moth known as Ursia furtiva.

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Despite progress in other areas of American life, women are still facing discrimination in the workplace — and it’s showing up in their paychecks. 

Tuesday’s Equal Pay Day marks the continuing discrepancy between men and women’s salaries, a date the country has been recognizing since 1996. But in the 27 years since the effort began to bring attention to the pay gap, it has narrowed very little. 

In 2023, women are earning 77 cents for every dollar earned by White men, the racial group with the highest pay across occupations. That figure takes the average pay for all full- and part-time working women and compares it with the average pay for White men. The figure is calculated based on earnings in 2021, the most recent data available from the U.S. Census Bureau. 

In 1996, women were earning 75 cents to the White man’s $1. Then, the number was calculated using only the wages for full-time workers — today the gap comparing full-time earnings alone would be 84 cents for women compared with $1 for White men. 

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The word power tends to have a negative connotation, but it is often required to get things done in the workplace. Contrary to what you may think, power dosn’t come only from the title you have or where you are on an org chart. In fact, one of the biggest mistakes people make at work is giving up their power because they think they don’t have any. 

Fortunately, you can build your power even more with intentional action, and I want you to know how you can be even more powerful than you already are. As a leadership consultant, I often advise people to “Lead from where you are,” because you have the power to positively affect your colleagues and your organization in whatever role you’re in. 

Though there are many different types of power at work, three are especially important: position, relationship, and expert. Here’s how these kinds of power function, and how you can develop them yourself:

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[Photo: Getty Images]

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