James' World 2

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All living organisms are made of cells, which are the smallest unit of life. Plants and animals have up to trillions of cells that work together to produce ever more intricate organization and function. Within cells are organelles, or little organs, that do specific jobs. Plant and animal cells have mitochondria, for example, which generate energy, and a nucleus that contains most of the genetic information and acts as a control center. These well-known organelles are enclosed within membranes that maintain their shape and separate them from the cytoplasm, the fluid that fills the cells.

But this textbook account of cells, with its neat division of labor into tidy membrane-bound packages, is incomplete. Not all organelles have membranes, and over the past decade, biologists have come to realize that membraneless organelles—such as tiny droplets of concentrated protein or other biomolecules—may be more plentiful and carry out more diverse tasks in cell function than was previously realized. Scientists call these droplets biomolecular condensates, an analogy to the droplets of water that condense on a cold glass of water on a humid day.

Their physics is somewhat of a mystery. Why don’t these little workers need walls to keep them contained, and how do they keep their elements separate from the cytoplasm around them? By understanding how condensates form and operate, we hope to finally figure out what they do.

This research is still emerging, but scientists think the droplets play vital roles related to gene regulation, cell division, and the transportation of materials within cells. There are even hints that biomolecular condensates are important in cellular processes related to human diseases, including amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) and other neurodegenerative disorders. So far, however, most of the evidence about biomolecular condensates comes from test tube experiments. In the coming years, researchers aim to understand how these droplets act in the more complex environment of a living cell. As we continue to discover new types of condensates and uncover new clues about their purposes, we hope we might even find a universal theory that will describe them all.

Under a microscope, biomolecular condensates look like tiny objects adrift in a sea of cytoplasm packed with organelles and other structures. Though suspended in this liquid, they act like a liquid themselves—they’re spherical in shape and deformable when poked with a micropipette. When two droplets come into contact, they merge into one. The recent discoveries about their possible biological significance have generated interest in how biomolecular condensates form. To a biophysicist like me, this looks like a question of thermodynamics.

Thermodynamics is the branch of physics concerned with the relationship between heat and other forms of energy. Its principles apply to everything from chemical reactions to meteorology. For our purposes, thermodynamics describes liquid-liquid phase separation—the division of a fluid into two compartments (or phases) with different concentrations and compositions. A classic example is oil and water. If I pour oil into a glass of water, at first the two fluids will mix somewhat. After several minutes, however, they will separate and form two phases: one that is enriched with oil and very little water and another that contains water and very little oil. In contrast, a case where entropy wins is the combination of milk and coffee, which become well mixed.

Thermodynamics tells us that this phase separation results from a competition between entropy and energy. Entropy is the amount of disorder in a system; it favors a uniform mixture of oil and water. Energy includes the energy contained in chemical bonds within each molecule, as well as the energy of interactions between molecules. In this case, the energy for oil molecules to interact with one another is lower than the energy for molecules of oil and water to interact, which drives the oil and water to split into distinct layers. The reduction of energy in the interactions between molecules outweighs the opposing contribution from entropy to stay evenly mixed.

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Photo illustration by Karl Russell Vickers

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When tropical meteorologists peer at satellite images, they often catch sight of subtle cloud formations hinting at something more ominous brewing.

The first signs of a potential hurricane can be detected days before a storm gains its fierce momentum. Wispy cirrus clouds radiating outward, the appearance of curved banding low-level clouds, and a drop in atmospheric pressure are all clues.

These early clues are crucial for predicting the onset of what might develop into a catastrophic hurricane.

I am a meteorology professor at Penn State, and my research group uses satellites and computer models to improve forecasting of tropical weather systems. With an especially fierce Atlantic storm season forecast for 2024, being able to detect these initial signals and provide early warnings is more important than ever. Here’s what forecasters look for.

Conditions ripe for a hurricane

Hurricanes typically start as atmospheric tropical waves, areas of low pressure associated with clusters of thunderstorms. As these tropical waves move westward across tropical oceans, some of them can develop into hurricanes.

The formation of a hurricane hinges on several specific conditions:

Distance from the Equator: Tropical cyclones usually form at least 5 degrees from the equator. This is because the Coriolis force, crucial for the initial spin-up of the cyclonic system, is weaker near the equator. The Coriolis force is caused by the Earth’s rotation, which makes moving air turn and swirl.

Warm sea surface temperatures: The sea surface temperature must be at least 26.5 degrees Celsius (about 80 Fahrenheit)for a hurricane to form. The warm water provides energy that drives the storm as the storm absorbs heat and moisture from the ocean.

Atmospheric instability and moisture: For tropical cyclones to form, the atmosphere needs to be unstable. This means that warm surface air rises and remains warmer than the surrounding air, allowing it to keep rising and forming thunderstorms. There also needs to be plenty of moisture, as dry air can cause clouds to evaporate and weaken the upward motions within thunderstorms. These factors are essential for the development of clustered thunderstorms within the tropical waves.

Low vertical wind shear: Strong vertical wind shear can tear a developing hurricane apart. Vertical wind shear is changes in wind direction or speed at different elevations. It disrupts a storm’s formation and growth and makes it hard for a hurricane to keep its vortex aligned.

Early forecasting requires more than satellites

Recognizing the early stages in the life cycle of a hurricane has been very challenging because there aren’t large numbers of surface stations and weather balloons to provide detailed atmospheric information over the open ocean.

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As with football or violin practice, young people could gain versatile life skills through routine contemplative training

When I was a child, I was introduced to contemplative practices that changed my life. Starting in the fourth grade, I regularly walked to my grandmother’s house after school. I vividly recall walking along the streets of that neighborhood, watching squirrels scurry up and down giant pine trees. When I arrived at her house, my grandmother greeted me at the side door and the two of us sat at her kitchen table to enjoy a snack and glass of juice. After small talk about my day, we went upstairs into the ‘blue room’, named because it was painted pale azure, where I laid down. Surrounded by walls of clear daytime sky, she guided me to close my eyes, rest my body, and enter new imaginal worlds.

Over time, drawing from her years of personal practice, she taught me how to calm my body with my breath, focus my attention on a chosen image or sensation, and mobilize my imagination. Forty years later, my appreciation for these fundamental life skills runs deep and, as a researcher, I seek to understand how contemplative practices such as these work so that others can derive their rewards too.

Contemplation, in this sense, refers to a diverse suite of practices and emergent experiences born from the capacity of the human mind to know itself – a feature shared with a few animals, including chimpanzees, bottlenose dolphins, and magpies – but, more so, from the mind’s ability to transform itself. Contemplative practices harness this capacity to transform and enhance individuals, communities, and lived worlds (including social, cultural, and ecological worlds). Across times and cultures, humans have devised a capacious repertoire of practices used to free the self from its felt confines, improve wellbeing, and access new knowledge about being human.

Contemplation is popularly associated with mindfulness and yoga, but it’s a big umbrella that covers many other practices, including techniques to cultivate prosocial emotions (such as compassion), to use the imagination to shape perceptions, to appraise and analyze critical topics, to contextualize the self within broader contexts, and to push the body and mind to total exaltation. By refining skills such as attentional balance, emotional regulation, empathic response, perspective-taking, and bodily awareness, practices of contemplation help us navigate and modulate the human experience.

Historically, practices of contemplation were inextricable from the rest of life, including its cultural, philosophical, cosmological, and religious dimensions. But since at least the 16th century in the West, due to the systematic rupture with traditions of contemplation, cultural attitudes towards contemplation have gotten skewed. It has consequently been marginalized in many societies, and people have grown estranged from it. To be estranged from contemplation means to no longer recognize your ability to apply specific practices designed to transform and enhance your life – the ability to which my grandmother opened my eyes.

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George Washington Middle School in Alexandria, Virginia, February 2020. Photo by Jahi Chikwendiu/The Washington Post/Getty

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The brain is a mere piece of furniture in the vastness of the cosmos, subject to the same physical laws as asteroids, electrons, or photons. On the surface, its three pounds of neural tissue seem to have little to do with quantum mechanics, the textbook theory that underlies all physical systems, since quantum effects are most pronounced on microscopic scales. Newly proposed experiments, however, promise to bridge this gap between microscopic and macroscopic systems, like the brain, and offer answers to the mystery of consciousness.

Quantum mechanics explains a range of phenomena that cannot be understood using the intuitions formed by everyday experience. Recall the Schrödinger’s cat thought experiment, in which a cat exists in a superposition of states, both dead and alive. In our daily lives, there seems to be no such uncertainty—a cat is either dead or alive. But the equations of quantum mechanics tell us that at any moment the world is composed of many such coexisting states, a tension that has long troubled physicists.

Taking the bull by its horns, the cosmologist Roger Penrose in 1989 made the radical suggestion that a conscious moment occurs whenever a superimposed quantum state collapses. The idea that two fundamental scientific mysteries—the origin of consciousness and the collapse of what is called the wave function in quantum mechanics—are related, triggered enormous excitement.

Penrose’s theory can be grounded in the intricacies of quantum computation. Consider a quantum bit, a qubit, the unit of information in quantum information theory that exists in a superposition of a logical 0 with a logical 1. According to Penrose, when this system collapses into either 0 or 1, a flicker of conscious experience is created, described by a single classical bit.

Penrose, together with anesthesiologist Stuart Hameroff, suggested that such collapse takes place in microtubules, tubelike, elongated structural proteins that form part of the cytoskeleton of cells, such as those making up the central nervous system.

These ideas have never been taken up by the scientific community as brains are wet and warm, inimical to the formation of superpositions, at least compared to existing quantum computers that operate at temperatures 10,000 times colder than room temperature to avoid destroying superposition states.

Penrose’s proposal suffers from a flaw when applied to two or more entangled qubits. Measuring one of these entangled qubits instantaneously reveals the state of the other one, no matter how far away. Their states are correlated, but correlation is not causation, and, according to standard quantum mechanics, entanglement cannot be employed to achieve faster-than-light communication. However, per Penrose’s proposal, qubits participating in an entangled state share a conscious experience. When one of them assumes a definite state, we could use this to establish a communication channel capable of transmitting information faster than the speed of light, a violation of special relativity.

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There are some people who just know when they’re going to die. I don’t know how they know, but they know. There are others who even seem to choose when they’ll die. Of course, not everyone appears to have control over their time of death, but when they do, I often see one of three things happen:

1. The person waits to die until every last one of their family members or friends arrives to be present with them.
2. The person waits to die until every last family member or friend leaves the room or the house.
3. The person waits to die until after a milestone has occurred.

All of these scenarios are so common in my experience, and I’ve seen each of them play out many, many times. Let’s take a closer look at them.

The Person Dies When Everyone Has Arrived

Sometimes a person will wait until all of their loved ones have flown or driven in from other places to say goodbye before they die. Or they’ll wait for every person to be physically present in the room with them, and then they’ll let go. This most often happens with a person who’s social and extroverted, who thrives off the energy of others.

Rachel had turned one hundred just five months before I met her when she came on hospice. At that time, a huge crowd of children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren, and even a few great-great-grandchildren gathered to celebrate the life of the family matriarch.

When I evaluated Rachel, it was very evident that she was in the stage of actively dying. All the signs were there. I saw it in the pallor of her skin. I heard it in her breathing. I noticed it in her lack of interest in or ability to eat food. The end was near.

“So,” I explained to Rachel’s two daughters who were in the home when I stopped by to do the admission. “What I’m seeing is that she’s actively dying. That means that in the next few days, she’ll die. So whoever needs to be here, get them here.”

Nodding, the sisters, who were in their seventies, agreed to mobilize everyone who’d want to come and say goodbye to Rachel.

Rachel had turned one hundred just five months before I met her when she came on hospice. At that time, a huge crowd of children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren, and even a few great-great-grandchildren gathered to celebrate the life of the family matriarch.

When I evaluated Rachel, it was very evident that she was in the stage of actively dying. All the signs were there. I saw it in the pallor of her skin. I heard it in her breathing. I noticed it in her lack of interest in or ability to eat food. The end was near.

“So,” I explained to Rachel’s two daughters who were in the home when I stopped by to do the admission. “What I’m seeing is that she’s actively dying. That means that in the next few days, she’ll die. So whoever needs to be here, get them here.”

Nodding, the sisters, who were in their seventies, agreed to mobilize everyone who’d want to come and say goodbye to Rachel.

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Setting an alarm for 4:00 A.M. on August 14 is a big ask, but the payoff will be worth it: Mars and Jupiter will shine like a double star in the sky. And if you’re lucky, you’ll also see a few Perseid meteors at the same time.

All the major planets in the solar system orbit the sun in roughly the same plane, which, as seen from Earth, means they follow an imaginary line in the sky called the ecliptic. They all move at different speeds around our star, so sometimes we see one lapping another, with the two appearing close together for a short time.

Such an event is commonly called a conjunction (though “appulse” is the more technically correct term, if you want to impress people at parties). Most times the planets pass relatively far apart, but during the early morning of August 14 in the Americas, Europe, and Africa, Mars and Jupiter will be a mere third of a degree apart in the sky: less than the apparent size of the full moon. (In Australia and much of Asia, this will occur on the morning of August 15.) This is a rare treat that’s worth getting up early for.

The conjunction is a slow process that will take many days, and even closest approach will last for many hours. The best time to see it will be from 3 to 4 A.M. wherever your location is (assuming you live in the midlatitudes) because that’s when the sky is still dark and the planets are high enough in the sky to see clearly.

You won’t need any fancy equipment to see it, either. Just go outside before sunrise while the sky is still dark, find a spot with a relatively clear horizon to the east, and look up. Jupiter will be the brightest “star” in the sky, 30 degrees above the horizon (which is roughly three times the size of your fist at arm’s length). Mars will be very close to it, a red spark next to Jupiter’s more brilliant white appearance.

If you could witness this from high above the solar system, you’d see Earth, Mars, and Jupiter in very nearly a perfectly straight line (technically called a syzygy, which is fun to say out loud). In reality, the two outer planets are quite far apart; Jupiter is 800 million kilometers from Earth while Mars is a mere 230 million km. Despite Mars being far closer to us, Jupiter is so much larger physically and more reflective of sunlight that the gas giant will appear 15 times brighter.

If you do have binoculars handy, you can also spot Jupiter’s four largest moons—Io, Europa, Callisto, and Ganymede (itself larger than the planet Mercury)—all lined up on either side of the planet. A small telescope will also reveal broad stripes across Jupiter, which represent darker and lighter wind patterns that wrap all the way around the planet.

Mars and Jupiter will appear close together for some time before and after August 14. On such occasions, I like to go out a night or two early so I can appreciate the approach as the two planets slowly close the gap between them in the sky night after night.

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1. Manage emotions without minimizing them

That adage about how you should “leave your emotions at the door” just doesn’t work. If you’ve tried it, you know it’s not that simple.

That said, while mentally strong people are aware of emotions triggered inside, they don’t let those emotions instantly flow through into words or actions. 

They catch their emotions, consider if they’re helpful to express, then decide how to respond. In other words, regarding unhelpful emotions, they catch it, check it, and change it (using the 3 Cs of cognitive behavioral therapy).

2. Remember confidence isn’t the absence of doubt

We all contend with doubt. Even the most confident people I’ve interviewed experience doubt. 

Confidence, then, is your ability to manage your relationship with the doubt you’ll inevitably experience. 

The mentally strong have found the right middle ground between overconfident and paralyzed by fear of failure. They acknowledge doubt, but let it sit quietly in the background so they can focus on how they will accomplish something, not if they can accomplish it in the first place.  

3. Talk to yourself like a friend in need

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NEW YORK CITY —The United Nations approved its first international cybercrime treaty yesterday. The effort succeeded despite opposition from tech companies and human rights groups, who warn that the agreement will permit countries to expand invasive electronic surveillance in the name of criminal investigations. Experts from these organizations say that the treaty undermines the global human rights of freedom of speech and expression because it contains clauses that countries could interpret to internationally prosecute any perceived crime that takes place on a computer system.

The U.N. committee room erupted in applause after the convention’s adoption, as many members and delegates celebrated the finale of three years of difficult discussions. In commending the adoption, delegates such as South Africa’s cited the treaty’s support for countries with relatively smaller cyber infrastructure.

But among the watchdog groups that monitored the meeting closely, the tone was funereal. “The U.N. cybercrime convention is a blank check for surveillance abuses,” says Katitza Rodriguez, the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s (EFF’s) policy director for global privacy. “It can and will be wielded as a tool for systemic rights violations.”

In the coming weeks, the treaty will head to a vote among the General Assembly’s 193 member states. If it’s accepted by a majority there, the treaty will move to the ratification process, in which individual country governments must sign on.

The treaty, called the Comprehensive International Convention on Countering the Use of Information and Communications Technologies for Criminal Purposes, was first devised in 2019, with debates to determine its substance beginning in 2021. It is intended to provide a global legal framework to prevent and respond to cybercrimes. In a July statement before the treaty’s adoption, the U.S. and fellow members of the Freedom Online Coalition described it as an opportunity “to enhance cooperation on combatting and preventing cybercrime and collecting and sharing electronic evidence for serious crimes” but noted that the agreement could be misused as a tool for human rights violations and called for its scope to be more precisely defined. (The U.S. Department of State did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Scientific American.)

The agreement is a reaction to major technological developments in the past few decades that allowed cyber threats to evolve at a rapid rate. In 2023 alone, more than 340 million people worldwide were affected by cybercrime, according to data from the Identity Theft Resource Center.

The years of deliberation over the long and complex treaty culminated in this week’s closing session of negotiations. Critics such as EFF and Human Rights Watch (HRW) argue the text’s scope is too broad, allowing countries to apply it to offenses beyond what were typically considered cybercrimes in the past. The Budapest Convention on Cybercrime, which went into effect in 2004, is the only other major international treaty to address cybercrime. It sought to criminalize a range of offenses, including cyber-enabled crimes (such as online bank scams or identity theft) and cyber-dependent ones (such as hacking and malware), while still aiming to accommodate human rights and liberties.

But experts have expressed that the newly adopted treaty lacks such safeguards for a free Internet. A major concern is that the treaty could be applied to all crimes as long as they involve information and communication technology (ICT) systems. HRW has documented the prosecution of LGBTQ+ people and others who expressed themselves online. This treaty could require countries’ governments to cooperate with other nations that have outlawed LGBTQ+ conduct or digital forms of political protest, for instance.

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I’ve done the traditional barbell squat my whole life. It’s a great exercise for overall lower-body strength. I’ve also experimented with other squat variations: the front squat, the goblet squat, the belt squat.

This year, I’ve been doing a squat that’s become my favorite ever: the Hatfield squat.

I love this exercise. I originally switched to it because long-standing problems with cranky shoulders and knee pain were making the traditional barbell squat uncomfortable. The Hatfield squat has made squatting fun and productive again after years of frustration trying to make the barbell squat work for me. What’s also great about the Hatfield Squat is that it’s an excellent movement for quad hypertrophy, which lines up nicely with my new fitness goal of getting more ripped. It’s been a game-changer in my training.

If you’ve had trouble with barbell squatting or are looking for a different squat variation to mix into your programming, here’s everything you need to know about the Hatfield squat.

What Is the Hatfield Squat, and What Are Its Benefits?

The Hatfield squat, named after powerlifting legend Dr. Fred Hatfield, aka Dr. Squat, is a back squat variation that requires a safety squat bar, which is a type of barbell that looks sort of like an ox yoke.

When you do the Hatfield squat, you place the safety squat bar on your back. Then, instead of holding on to the safety squat bar with your hands, you rest your hands on an additional barbell or a set of handles that have been placed at navel level on the barbell rack. As you descend into the squat, you keep your hands on the support in front of you, using it to maintain your balance and an upright torso.

This increases the stability of the exercise, allowing the Hatfield squat to offer some unique benefits:

Great for quad hypertrophy. If you’re looking to grow legs as big as tree trunks, the Hatfield squat can be a helpful tool. Its increased stability allows you to overload your quads more than a traditional squat. Instead of focusing on keeping your balance during the squat, you can just focus on the movement, which means you can be a bit more aggressive in adding reps or weight.

Great for squatting around injuries. The most significant benefit that the Hatfield squat has given me is that it has allowed me to squat heavy again despite the niggling physical issues I’ve had on and off for years.

Because I have shoulder tendonitis due to bench pressing and struggle with shoulder flexibility (despite the amount of time I’ve worked on developing this capacity), the bar position on the traditional low-bar squat just exacerbated my shoulder pain. Because you use a safety bar with the Hatfield squat, you don’t have to use your hands to hold the bar on your back. It completely removes the stress on your shoulders.

The Hatfield squat has also allowed me to work around some pain I’ve had behind my knee since 2020. The pain only happens during the descent part of a traditional barbell squat. I still don’t know what the source of the pain is despite talking to an orthopedic surgeon and getting an MRI done. I reckon it’s some sort of overuse injury on a tendon back there. But at any rate, the increased stability of the Hatfield squat allows me to squat heavy and below parallel without any pain behind my knee.

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