James' World 2

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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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There was a time when we didn’t question whether fruit was good for us when we more or less took “eat your fruits and veggies” to heart. Today, some people are worried that fruit is too high in carbs, sugar, and calories. One of my patients wouldn’t eat any fruit other than blueberries because she had bought into the myth — again, promoted by fad diets — that blueberries are the only “safe” fruit to eat because they are “low glycemic” (in other words, they don’t cause your blood sugar to spike). Here’s the kicker: She didn’t even like blueberries.

Berries are the only fruit allowed on the pegan diet, the subtext being that other fruit is a ticket to high blood sugar, but this is a fairly liberal stance compared with other fad diets du jour. For example, many followers of the keto diet and the trending carnivore diet (a.k.a. the “zero carb” diet) call fruit toxic because of its sugar. Now, that’s what I consider disordered eating.

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Isaac Newton was baffled. He was already famous for discovering how gravity holds the universe together and for using that knowledge to predict the movements of celestial bodies, such as the moon’s path around the Earth. Now, by taking the sun’s gravitational tugs into account, he sought to improve his lunar predictions. Instead, it made them worse.

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Emiliano Ponzi

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We trekked through the Bolivian Amazon, drenched in sweat. Draped head to toe in bug-repellent gear, we stayed just ahead of the clouds of mosquitoes as we sidestepped roots, vines, and giant ants. My local research assistant Dino Nate, my partner Kelly Rosinger and I were following Julio, one of my Tsimane’ friends and our guide on this day. Tsimane’ are a group of forager-horticulturalists who live in this hot, humid region. Just behind us, Julio’s three-year-old son floated happily through the jungle, unfazed by the heat and insects despite his lack of protective clothing, putting my perspiration-soaked efforts to shame.

We stopped in front of what looked like a small tree but turned out to be a large vine. Julio told us Tsimane’ use it when they are in the old-growth forest and need water. He began whacking at the vine from all sides with his machete, sending chips of bark flying with each stroke. Within two minutes, he had cut off a meter-long section. Water started to pour out of it. He held it over his mouth, drinking from it for a few seconds to quench his thirst, then offered it to me. I put my water bottle under the vine and collected a cup. It tasted pretty good: light, a little chalky, almost carbonated.

As part of my field research, I was asking Julio and other Tsimane’ people how they obtain the drinking water they need in different places—in their homes, in the fields, on the river, or in the forest. He told me only two types of vines are used for water; the rest don’t work or make you sick. But when he pointed to those other vines, I could hardly tell a difference. The vines are a hidden source of water. Julio’s observations raise a fundamental question of human adaptation: How did our evolutionary history shape the strategies we use to meet our water needs, particularly in environments without ready access to clean water?

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Credit: I AM A PHOTOGRAPHER AND AN ARTIST, Getty Images

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Astronomers have found an extra-low hum rumbling through the universe.

The discovery, announced today, shows that extra-large ripples in space-time are constantly squashing and changing the shape of space. These gravitational waves are cousins to the echoes from black hole collisions first picked up by the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) experiment in 2015. But whereas LIGO’s waves might vibrate a few hundred times a second, it might take years or decades for a single one of these gravitational waves to pass by at the speed of light.

The finding has opened a wholly new window on the universe, one that promises to reveal previously hidden phenomena such as the cosmic whirling of black holes that have the mass of billions of suns, or possibly even more exotic (and still hypothetical) celestial specters.

“It’s beautiful,” said Chiara Caprini, a theoretical physicist at the University of Geneva and CERN in Switzerland who was not directly involved in the work. “A new era in the observation of the universe has opened up.”

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The 100-meter Green Bank Telescope has precisely measured the timing of dozens of pulsars over the course of 15 years.

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The deadliest animal in the world is smaller than a pencil eraser and weighs around two-thousandths of a gram — less than the weight of a single raindrop. Every year, it kills an estimated 700,000 people by partaking in what scientists grimly call a “blood meal.”

It’s the mosquito — and, increasingly, it’s on the move.

These global shifts, which will only accelerate as the planet warms, have sparked concern that the diseases mosquitoes carry will exact an even higher toll in the months and years to come.

In June alone, five cases of locally transmitted malaria were discovered in Texas and Florida: the first cases acquired in the United States in two decades. These cases, experts say, are unlikely to have a connection to warming temperatures — conditions in Florida and Texas are already suitable for malaria-carrying mosquitoes. But as urban heat islands expand and temperatures rise, mosquito-borne diseases are expected to travel outside of their typical regions.

“Climate change allows the creeping edge of mosquito ranges to expand,” said Sadie Ryan, a professor of medical geography at the University of Florida.

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Barrington Sanders, a Miami-Dade mosquito control inspector, sprays a pesticide to kill adult mosquitoes Thursday in Miami. (Joe Raedle/Getty Images)

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X marked the spot. We were close.

That morning, a crew of diving archaeologists boarded a boat in the town of St. Marks, Florida, and steamed out to the Gulf of Mexico. As the sun rose and the morning fog lifted, the pontoon boat followed the winding St. Marks River through the mangroves. Alligators’ eyes sank into the brackish water as the boat chugged past, noisy herons took flight. On our right, we passed Fort San Marcos de Apalache, built by the Spanish in the 17th century at the confluence of the St. Marks and Wakulla Rivers. Over the centuries, the fort was burned, rebuilt, looted by pirates, occupied by the British, retaken by the Spanish, and later seized by Andrew Jackson, the seventh president of the United States. What had once been a commanding fortress, hurricanes, and history had eroded into an overgrown spit of jungle lined by boulders. Here and there, tall copses of pines and pond cypresses rose above the swamp; each one was likely an archaeological site with an oyster midden hidden at its base. This is the “real” Florida, as locals here in the Big Bend like to say, far from the glitz and glamor of Miami but rich in history.

I first met the archaeologists in the summer of 2021. Shawn Joy, with Florida’s Department of Historical Resources, and his collaborator Morgan Smith, an assistant professor at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, had just finished mapping portions of Florida’s Apalachee Bay in the Gulf of Mexico, where they turned up nearly two dozen potential sites from the Late Archaic period (5,000 to 2,500 years ago).

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Mapping Florida’s Apalachee Bay reveals a submerged quarry site where precontact people seem to have worked and lived. Photo by Frank Tozier/Alamy Stock Photo

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It is one of the most universal of parenting fears, a necessary evil we cannot shield our kids from for long because we know they will have to live and work in this world as adults. I am talking, of course, about the internet. From the time they’re toddling around and trying to pry our own phones out of our hands, to their teenage days, when much of their social life happens online, we’ve got precious few years to teach our kids how to navigate the online world as safely as possible.

For help on how to do that, I spoke with Devorah Heitner, author of Screenwise: Helping Kids Thrive (and Survive) in Their Digital World, and the upcoming book Growing Up in Public: Coming of Age in a Digital World. I’ll also provide some additional resources for each age group along the way.

Teaching preschoolers about online safety

Even before they’re old enough to be texting with friends, posting on social media, or gaming on servers with strangers around the world, it’s important to start modeling healthy tech use. The first thing to recognize with preschoolers, Heitner says, is that we are using technology in front of them all the time. They know we’re taking pictures and videos of them on our phones, they see us scrolling endlessly while they’re splashing in the bathtub, and they may even bring our phones to us when we leave them in another room because they know how important that device is.

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Illustration: Alisa Stern; Shutterstock / matka_Wariatka, mstanley

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